


Peter and Stiles Are Getting Married

by Guede



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alive Laura Hale, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, BAMF Lydia Martin, Crack Treated Seriously, Dom/sub Undertones, Dubious Morality, Established Peter Hale/Stiles Stilinski, F/F, F/M, Humor, Idiots in Love, M/M, Magical Stiles Stilinski, Marriage Proposal, May/December Relationship, Multi, Nipple Play, Pack Bonding, Pack Dynamics, Pining, Polyamory, Sheriff Stilinski is a Good Parent, Sheriff Stilinski's Name is John, Stag Nights & Bachelor Parties, Wedding Planning, Weddings, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-26
Updated: 2016-09-02
Packaged: 2018-08-11 06:12:11
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 34,813
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7879618
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Guede/pseuds/Guede
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The wedding is actually not the main event here.  Or, Lydia is planning <i>that</i>, obviously, but…pretty much everybody else has plans, too.  Including Stiles and Peter.</p><p>9/1/16: Added the two epilogues.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue

“Goddamn it, Peter,” Stiles snaps, wiping the ash off his hands. “I swear, sometimes I don’t know—no, you know, let’s make that a full-on question. _Why_ do I keep saving your ass? What do I do this for, really? And is it worth the zillion enemies and cover-ups and, you know, _once-in-a-lifetime chances to meet actual gods_ that I pass up?”

“Wait, what, gods?” Erica mutters as she fingers her slashed skirt. “Don’t tell me—”

Lydia smacks the wet-wipe container into Erica’s solar plexus, shutting her up with a hard wheeze. “He means the gaming con he had to skip.”

“Oh, man, I forgot,” Scott says mournfully. “Right. He really wanted to meet this game designer who hasn’t appeared in public in something like ten years…”

“Stiles,” Peter says, very carefully, from his position sitting on said ass on the ground, surrounded by still-smoking bodies. “Stiles. I am very sorry, and believe me, I had no idea—”

“I underestimated and overestimated, blah blah blah, wanted to surprise you so just never mind about the statistically provable fact that I screw up _seventy-two percent_ of my schemes when I don’t consult you,” Stiles rants, stalking around Peter without looking at him, or at the crispy bodies falling to powder as Stiles kicks through them. “Because I have never, ever met a dramatic moment I didn’t want to smarm up till I _completely_ lost the tactical advantage—”

Peter straightens his shoulders and takes a deep breath—then promptly wastes that, hissing and ducking, as Stiles’ wild gesticulating comes within an inch of his eye. Everyone grimaces, and most of them also end up looking pointedly at Scott. Who obligingly starts to get up, only to have his arm snagged by Lydia. Scott frowns and looks at her, but she’s watching…Peter, who has ducked two more swings of Stiles’ arm, then darted forward to grab Stiles’ hand on the third swing.

“Stiles,” Peter says.

“God, what?” Stiles snarls. He twists around, and while that doesn’t free his hand, it does finally put him and Peter eye-to-eye.

“Stiles,” Peter says, shifting up on his knees. He’s in earnest, enough to make Stiles’ brows tick up in suspicion, and he only doubles down on that as he tugs at Stiles’ hand. “Stiles. Marry me.”

Lydia produces a taser and a gun—both miraculously clean, considering the bloody, trampled, burnt surroundings, and thus not likely to jam—and points the taser at Erica and the gun at Derek. Erica looks offended, then blinks hard, nods in understanding, and drops belly-down so that Lydia has a clear shot at Laura.

“I guess I’m okay?” Cora mutters.

“I think I’m supposed to handle you, actually,” Scott sighs.

Cora looks dubiously at Scott, while across the clearing, an eerily similar expression graces Stiles’ face. He’s not struggling away from Peter, but he’s also not moving forward, or showing any sort of positive reaction, which, judging from Peter’s increasingly visible fidgeting, is concerning.

“Aaaand…why?” Stiles finally says.

“Well,” Peter says, with a little bit of an inhale that undercuts his attempt to sound like he was, in fact, completely expecting that. “You’ll be my closest next of kin for medical decisions when I’m incapacitated. You’ll inherit my estate by default upon my death. You’ll have the legal right to…to refuse to refer to yourself as Mr. Hale. You’ll—”

“What about having him call himself Mr. Stilinski?” Boyd whispers, hooking his chin at Peter.

“Not how they work,” Allison mutters, still shaking the mud out of her crossbow.

“Seriously,” Stiles says, with an annoyed side-flick of his eyes towards them. Then he sighs and turns back to Peter, who’s shut his mouth in favor of looking hopeful with a slight edge of desperation. “You honestly just wanted to get that out there, didn’t you. Stiles Hale, sure, and if that didn’t sound like a shitty novelty beer, your obsessive-possessive marking behavior can just take _all_ the name-change paperwork and stuff it, you asshole, like falsifying electronic records isn’t enough of a—”

Peter grins. “So yes?”

“Oh, my _God_ , you are driving me insane tonight,” Stiles snarls, yanking his hand away from Peter.

And then he grabs the front of Peter’s shirt, what’s left of it, with both hands, and yanks Peter up. By the time Peter’s on his feet, the two of them are wrapped around each other, Stiles’ fingers smearing gritty ash streaks across Peter’s neck and up into his hair, streaking that light grey, while Peter’s hands gradually disappear up the back of Stiles’ shirt. Then Stiles breaks off and cranes his head backward to look at Peter.

“I mean, yeah, let’s do it legally,” Stiles says. “Not I’m gonna change my name, you arrogant creep. Or get over your incompetent evil just ‘cause you proposed. Or—are you getting me a ring? You’d better, God, unless you really want this to look like you were just trying to distra—oh, hell with it, you smug _bastard_.”

Peter doesn’t answer, just smiles and smiles and smiles as he hitches his head forward, a little bit further each time, till Stiles rolls his eyes and hauls him back into another kiss. They stumble as Peter’s foot slips on a…bone remnant, and then again as Stiles overcorrects trying to right them. Then they run up against a tree, and Stiles shrugs and wraps his hands in Peter’s shirt till the large tear down the front completely gives way, and at that point everyone else averts their eyes.

“Okay, really, do you think we’re going to object?” Laura says, upon realizing that there’s still a taser on her. “They deserve each other more than any of us—”

“You’re all helping with the wedding planning,” Lydia says.

Derek’s eyes bulge. He twitches forward and Lydia shifts the gun so it’s pointing higher up his thigh and he winces and then looks resentful and then passes into deep, gloomy resignation, all in a matter of seconds.

“ _All_ of you,” Lydia says. She lowers the gun and the taser, but the gaze she sweeps around in their place is, if anything, more menacing. “I love Stiles, but I am not doing this myself. Is that understood?”

“McCall,” Jackson says, panic breaking through the outrage in his voice. “Mc—Scott. Scott. Come on. _Scott_.”

“Look, if I could, I would,” Scott says, with a slightly guilty look towards Allison. At least, till she sighs and gives him a half-hearted smile, and then he just looks tiredly determined. “But…but realistically, I think Lydia’s right. If this is going to go off without a problem, it’s going to take a lit—a lot—look, there’s no way the town is surviving if we don’t, you know that.”

“You’re helping,” Lydia says, looking at all of them. “And _nothing_ is getting you out of it.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm still debating whether to put up the rest all at once, or to do this as a daily update story, but anyway--I'm putting up this initial chapter because, while I already have the plotlines thought out and fully intend to finish writing this, I could use some crowdsourced inspiration for the details, and specifically, for wedding-related embarrassments and disasters. See, the thing is, my experiences with wedding planning and bridal showers and so forth have been pretty tame, and I would like to not have to resort to just the usual Hollywood tropes about wild stag parties.
> 
> No guarantees I'll use your anecdotes, but they'll be helpful even if they don't make it into the story!
> 
> ETA: Thanks, all!


	2. Chapter 2

_Months Later_

“You’re not getting out of this,” Stiles says, staring Peter down. “You asked for it, you know that.”

Peter doesn’t so much as quiver an eyelid. He does, however, slather on so much charm in his voice and smile and sparkling eyes that the air practically crystallizes sugar around him. “Stiles. My mate. My darling fiancé. My best, cleanest-murdering, smoothest-lying accomplice—”

“Stop trying to sweet-talk me, and also, I haven’t been the accomplice since, what, fifteen Big Bads ago?” Stiles says, wagging his finger in Peter’s face. “You—”

“Stiles, just hear me out.” Sighing, Peter drops the charm and just looks pleadingly at the other man. He does also wrap his hand around Stiles’ finger, drawing it down so that its tip just grazes his jawline before ending up pressed against his chest, just above the collar of his very low v-neck sweater.

Which Stiles glances at, then drags his eyes back up with palpable annoyance. “You’re not weaseling out of it, Peter, so stop trying to shove your man-cleavage at me.”

“I happen to know you went around to all the stores with a measuring tape and bribed the clerks to put the ones you approved on the top of the stacks,” Peter sniffs. Then he gives himself a little shake and appears to sober up. “I’m not trying to weasel out of it. I know this is important to you, but it’s just…I thought we discussed this, and we agreed it makes no sense to make an overwrought production out of things. I just—I want to make sure we don’t lose track of that, just because there are so many hands involved.”

“Okay…yeah, we did,” Stiles says, softening. “But come on, Peter, it’s just a party, and we’ve only got people who’ve buried bodies with us. I think that’s pretty selective, right?”

“It’s two parties,” Peter says.

He’s a little sharp. He realizes his mistake and tries to smile his way out of it, but Stiles is already smirking. And sliding his hands up Peter’s sides to just under Peter’s pecs, his thumbs running along the bottom edges of those—which are visible thanks to how skin-tight the sweater is.

“ _Oh_ ,” Stiles says, leaning in. He—does something with his thumbs, right as Peter starts to make some excuse, and instead Peter inhales sharply and gets a distracted look in his eyes. “Oh, oh, I get it, you’re all pissy ‘cause I’m gonna raise hell with the girls and you’re not gonna be there and Peter, for God’s sake, you have an _entire_ party to yourself.”

“Which you put Scott in charge of,” Peter mutters.

“Peter, Scott is my best man,” Stiles says. “One, it’s tradition. Two, Lydia put him in charge and I just didn’t see the sense in fighting that war. And three, if you can’t figure out how to deal with that, you are _so_ not the guy I wanna marry.”

“St—” Peter says around Stiles’ tongue. He makes a half-annoyed, half-lustful noise, his hands coming up to indecisively knead at Stiles’ hips. Then he makes another, surprised noise that quickly slides into a groan as Stiles starts to walk him backwards.

“I hate you and I wish your dad hadn’t arrested Laura for speeding and talked us into staying till you ended up ‘accidentally’ getting Peter out of his coma,” Derek says. “The day the two of you met made my life so, so much worse.”

Stiles flaps dismissively at him, then pulls that hand back to start squeezing it into Peter’s back jeans-pocket. And the two of them keep inching backward.

Derek sighs. “Two more steps and you’re going to end up on the salmon thing samples, and if you send one more caterer into hysterics, Lydia will murder you. And probably figure out how to have a wedding with your corpses anyway, and—and can you just come back and pick a corsage so we can all go home?”

“Wow, Derek, you’re really voicing those feelings of yours,” Stiles says, reluctantly peeling himself off Peter. He and Peter look regretfully at each other—Derek isn’t stupid enough to assign that to anything but Lydia learning how to direct her banshee screams so only specific people hear them—and then he leans in for a last peck, while feeling up an obscenely purring Peter’s throat. “I take it that the camping therapy is working?”

“Shut up,” Derek mutters, rubbing at the side of his face. “Scott drags me on those, and I _feel_ like that is an abuse of his alpha powers.”

“I’ll deal with the florist,” Peter sighs. He rubs his cheek against Stiles’ hand, then steps back, safely away from the samples platter. “Since you’re so good as to deal with my nephew, it’s the least I can do.”

“And thank you for involuntarily volunteering me,” Stiles snorts, though he’s still looking disgustingly fond as Peter walks off. Then he turns to Derek. “As for you, your sister literally packed you into your sleeping bag for the first trip, so don’t lay it all on Scott.”

Derek grimaces and turns away, pulling out his phone because it’s been ten minutes since Lydia sent him chasing after Peter and Stiles, and so he knows there are at least five new things he’s supposed to drag Stiles to. “I’m not. My sister also abuses her alpha powers.”

“I’ll say. She let you get past the age of twenty without trying a s’more, and then when Scott showed you, I heard you sneaked off and used up the whole package of graham crackers,” Stiles says. “You’re like the grumpy, sexy stubble pin-up boy for childhood enrich—”

“Stiles, come on, don’t make fun of Derek,” Scott says, coming into the room. “I never even knew about gutting fish till your dad and you showed me.”

“But that’s different!” Stiles says. “We live in suburbia, mostly, occasional preserve runs aside, and fish come pre-cleaned at the supermarket and father-son bonding aside, I have no shame about taking advantage of…wait. Is that…”

Scott unhappily holds out the tablet. “Listen, before you start, Jackson really tried, he really did, I was right there next to him when he called his dad, but—”

“Oh, my God, can that jackass lawyer not keep his political favors out of our wedding reception?” Stiles says, snatching the tablet and then swiping furiously at it. “Peter and I _just_ figured out where to put Lydia’s mom’s boytoy, for God’s sake, now what are we going to do about those succubi…”

He wanders off, cursing under his breath. Scott looks guiltily after him, then sighs and leans against the nearest table, raking one hand through his hair.

“Seating plan?” Derek says.

“Jackson’s dad wants us to move one of his friends so he’s nearer Stiles’ dad,” Scott mutters, moving his hand down to pinch at his nose. “I think it has something to do with a contract to upgrade the police cars, but…anyway, I don’t think you want to know about that. Did the food and flowers get finalized, at least?”

Derek looks at Scott, who, somehow, musters up a flicker of genuine, if wry, hope. “Maybe,” Derek says. His phone buzzes again and he glances down long enough to register it’s a Lydia text. “I think they got the hors d’oeuvres settled, and probably the dessert, but then they started bickering before they got to the entrée.”

Scott looks sympathetic. “Well, wedding planning is stressful,” he says. “I remember having nightmares about showing up and nobody was there, because I told everybody the wrong date.”

“You and Allison got married in your backyard,” Derek says after a second. “If that happened, you could just go back in and have breakfast.”

“Yeah. Yeah, I know, right?” Scott says, with a deprecating laugh and another ruffle at his hair. “But for some reason, in the dream, it was gonna be downtown in—well, never mind.”

“Don’t check that,” Derek says as Scott pulls out his buzzing phone. “You know it’s Lydia yelling at you because you missed her yelling at you ten texts ago.”

Scott blinks and glances over, then snorts wearily. He still checks his phone anyway, and Derek can see his thumb twitch up to hit ‘reply,’ but then that moves back and Scott just presses his phone against his hip. “She’s just trying to make this go right for Stiles,” he says. Even his patience sounds a little strained and he seems to hear it, grimacing and looking up at Derek. “Anyway, how are you?”

“What?” Derek says, startled. Then he shoves his hand up and pretends he’s scratching his neck so he can hide his grimace behind his arm. “I’m—”

“There, seriously, I swear, if that asshole tries to shoehorn another backroom deal into my reception, I’m gonna start charging _him_ fees,” Stiles says, stalking back. He jabs the tablet at Scott, who, being Scott, thinks that’s normal and takes it and immediately calls up Lydia to relay the changes. “What?”

Derek raises his brows. 

“The homicidal look, what the what with that?” Stiles clarifies, or so he probably thinks. “These days you usually just look like you’re gonna revenge-puke in my shoes later.”

“That’s because every time I see you, you’re about two seconds from screwing my uncle, if you’re not actually doing that already,” Derek says. “Anyway—”

“Scott? Scott— _Scott_. There you—oh, hi,” Allison says, pulling up just a step inside the room. She twists her frown into a tight smile, nodding at Derek and Stiles. “Sorry, I thought you guys were onto the flowers now.”

“Peter’s on that, I’m still trying to talk the caterer into the pig’s blood fountain,” Stiles says. “You know. Old rustic Polish tradition and all that, and nothing at all to do with sucking up to certain stupid distant werewolf relatives who won’t show up for a funeral but totally will blow their tops if there’s a free wet bar they’re not invited to.”

Allison’s smile slips back to a frown. “Oh. Well…let me know if you want some kind of old-looking document to back that up,” she says after a second. “Dad and I were cleaning out the attic last weekend, I’ve got the parchment lying around. But, um, sorry, I…I just need to talk to Scott for a moment.”

Stiles shrugs and steps out of the way, leaving Scott to stiffen ever-so-slightly before he smiles and passes the tablet back to Allison, and heads with her into the hall. They’re barely out of the room before Scott mutters that if it’s about the extra patrol, he’s sorry he didn’t tell her but he double-checked that their calendar’s up to date now. Allison’s heartbeat jumps irritably, though her voice is pretty even when she says that no, actually, she wanted to talk about how she’d run into his mom and they were apparently having dinner together next—

“They’re okay,” Stiles says. Making Derek jump and scowl, and of course Stiles looks amused about that, because the guy finds it funny that he can use obscure diseases to scare people into thinking that _actually_ wasn’t a werewolf they saw. But Stiles is also watching Derek with a thoughtful look that he usually pulls out when he’s about to scare somebody straight-up dead. “It’s Scott and Allison, you know, they’re rock-solid. Solider than the earth, even.”

“Did I say something?” Derek mutters, turning half-away. And taking out his phone, because even wading through Lydia’s endless variations on dismembering is better than dealing with Stiles when the guy looks like that.

“Well, no, but it’s you, so really, it’s not the words so much as the extremely meaningful looks…” Stiles trails off and takes a step back, which is enough to get Derek to look up just as Allison comes back into the room.

She’s rubbing the side of her face, a little pinched around the eyes, looking just as harried as Scott had a second ago. When she sees Derek and Stiles, she pauses and visibly stops the deep breath she was about to take, and lets her composure creep back up more subtly. “Scott’s mom just needed something,” she says. “He’s giving her a call and he’ll be right back. You didn’t need—”

“Huh? Nah, we were almost done here. Oh, but just—actually, since you _are_ here…hang on, let me just get the platter,” Stiles says, twirling around, glancing about the room, and then snapping his fingers one way and heading off in that direction. “I want another opinion. Peter and Derek are both saying that it’s got way too much chili sauce, but we’re not just feeding super-tongues, right, we gotta cover the rest of the world…back in a second.”

“Sure,” Allison says as he walks away. She looks absently after him, her arms coming up to wrap around herself. Then she turns and her and Derek’s eyes happen to meet.

Allison’s mouth twitches into a smile that barely holds till she, still turning, looks over at the doorway just as Scott’s walking across it. He doesn’t see her—he’s busy talking to his mom about her car—and he keeps on walking till he disappears into the other side of the hall. Meanwhile, Allison presses her lips tightly together. Then she goes still.

“You okay?” Derek says. She’s not Stiles, so he doesn’t feel like denying he was staring, since Allison’s probably not going to ding him on it every five seconds for the rest of his life.

“Hmm, I’m fine, why?” Allison says, smiling blandly at him.

Derek looks at her.

“We just had some schedule miscommunication,” Allison says after a second, in a softer, more irritated tone. She shifts her arms around herself, then swings one arm straight down by her side, leaving the other up to squeeze at her ribs. “It’s not a big deal, it’s just…I mean, we both had a lot of solo jobs this month, and I guess we just…kind of fell out of telling each other where we’re gonna be. I was doing it as much as he was, and…”

“Yeah, Erica and Cora were yelling at him earlier for that too,” Derek says. So she looks at him, and Derek snorts and tips his head at her. “Okay, Erica was yelling, and Cora was just threatening him. Which I already told her to stop, she wasn’t even up for patrol, she just thinks he’s leaving her out of stuff again ‘cause he thinks she gets too violent.”

Allison slants another look at him, slightly more conspiratorial. “Because she is.”

“Which I also told her,” Derek says. He watches her as she looks away, smiling at the far wall, and then as she takes a breath and resettles her arm around herself, her smile already fading. “Was he worried about you?”

“Hmmm? No, you know he’s not like that, he knows I can handle my share,” Allison says. She shoots him a sharp glance, then gives him another, closer look. Then she smiles again. “Thanks, Derek. But—look, it’s nice of you to try and cheer me up, but it wasn’t—it’s really not a big deal, it’s just…bunch of stupid little things. He forgot to tell me he’s taking extra patrol, so I didn’t realize he wasn’t getting the groceries and we ended up eating ramen for dinner. I forgot to tell him I had to use the spare tire, so when he blew out one chasing—you know, that kind of stuff. It’s fine, it’s just been a rough month.”

“No kidding,” Stiles says. He pauses as they both start, then holds out a platter covered with little pieces of bread smeared with stuff. “Well, let me know if I gotta straighten Scotty out. And you know, honestly, Lydia doesn’t need the whole pack twenty-four seven for wedding stuff, I can pry people away from her too.”

Allison laughs and snags a piece of bread. “Tempting, but I think we’re through the bad spot,” she says. “We were both clearing up for the bachelor parties, you know.”

“And believe me, I appreciate that a lot,” Stiles says. He pops an appetizer into his mouth, then puts the platter down when Derek doesn’t take one. “Too hot?”

“No, I think that’s okay,” Allison says after a moment’s chewing. “Though…it’s really heavy on the cumin. It’s kind of making me want to sneeze.”

“Hmm,” Stiles says, before flipping out his phone and texting furiously.

He gets Allison’s opinion on some mini-quiche whatever, and then Allison excuses herself because Lydia’s screaming for somebody to come block the back door so she can finish some negotiation. Scott still isn’t back, so Derek starts scrolling through Lydia’s texts again, trying to pick her actual requests out of all the insults so he can have an excuse to leave.

“I stand corrected,” Stiles says.

“What?” Derek mutters.

“Oh, nothing.” When Derek looks up, Stiles is just smirking, in that way that means he’s about to blackmail worse than Peter ever did. “Just, I kind of forgot, but they both go on those camping trips, don’t they? And I don’t mean the ones for the whole pack.”

“I need to go terrorize your venue manager,” Derek says after a long pause.

Stiles shrugs. “Yeah, sure, thanks. Just remember, Derek, if we lose that hall ‘cause you accidentally kill the guy, back-up venue’s your family’s backyard and then you’re gonna have to listen to me and Peter have honeymoon sex all—”

“I hate you,” Derek says, walking off.

* * *

Peter walks into the room, then sighs. “Honestly, Argent, our _florist_?”

“It’s the assistant, and Stiles asked me to confirm they weren’t a _darach_ ,” Chris grunts, glaring at Alan. For a professional druid, and one who’s been hanging around Beacon Hills since Talia Hale’s days, he acts like he doesn’t know a damn thing about how to carry a dead body. “Which, obviously, I couldn’t do. But I saved you from being a sacrifice so just get the damn bag, would you?”

Being the smug, deliberate bastard that he is, Peter lazily toes the body bag around so that Chris and Alan can shuffle two feet sideways and then lever the corpse into it. As soon as the butt slides in, Alan drops his end and wipes his hands. Which means that one foot ends up still peeking out, so once Chris has tucked in the head, he has to stalk around and stuff that in, and then check over the bag’s outside for any telltale stains.

“I’ll go make sure the back door to the garage is clear,” Alan volunteers.

Chris…lets the man go, because Deaton is competent enough for that and Chris does prefer to clean up his own scenes, so he knows whose fault is any mistakes, and okay, he’s just had his fill of working with Alan for the moment. He’s getting old, his temper’s shorter, and Peter Hale won’t stop smirking at him.

“Well, I’m glad to see that our families’ truce is still intact,” Peter purrs, settling himself against the table with the corsages. “It’d be such a shame if that fell apart now, what with the upcoming festivities and all.”

“If that happens, I don’t think it’ll be the guy who’s committing murder on your behalf who does it,” Chris mutters, getting out his fingerprint spray.

“Now, really, do you have to sound so grudging about it?” Peter says. His fingers drum softly against the table, then go silent. A second later his voice comes from just above Chris, as he watches Chris deal with the chair and carpet. “You’ve killed for far less noble reasons than—”

“I killed that man because he already murdered an innocent girl, and he had photos and addresses for two more the same age on his phone,” Chris says. He flicks his hand at the body bag, then switches out the fingerprint spray for the bloodstain remover and his phone, which he switches to blood-scanning to check if he’s missed any spots. “ _Not_ for your gratification, Hale.”

“And there you go with the formalities,” Peter sighs, squatting down. His hands bob here and there, and then he gets impatient and cranes his head and shoulders even lower so that Chris has to look him in the eye. “Chris, honestly, we’ve known each other one way or the other for decades at this point. I think the sheer number of deaths _alone_ put us on a first-name basis.”

“Yeah, do you now?” Chris sweeps his phone over the carpet one more time, then sits back on his heels. As Peter straightens up, Chris pulls out a paper towel, spritzes remover on it, and then pitches it into Peter’s lap. “Maybe it’s just me, but I’m not sure talking about the family we’ve each killed is a _great_ way to demonstrate how friendly we should be.”

Peter laughs and plucks idly at the towel. Then, just as Chris is reaching for another towel to do it himself, he takes that up and bends down to give the missed splatter a scrub, sniffing once in a while to check what’s left. “Well, I wasn’t aware that I needed to demonstrate that. Because, unless you’re suffering from targeted amnesia—which _is_ a problem in your family, I know—we already covered that quite thoroughly. Admittedly that was years ago, but it was rather memor—”

“Aren’t you getting married?” Chris snaps.

Instead of answering, Peter rolls up off his feet and scoots back to drop into a nearby chair, then turns to pick up one of the corsages. “I understand that the lilies might cause a diplomatic incident with the kitsuné guests, but I just don’t think that the pansies have the same drama,” he says, twisting it in his fingers. “Don’t you think?”

Chris just keeps himself to rolling his eyes, and not using any of the firearms he’s brought with him. “ _Peter_. Why the hell am I here, anyway? And don’t tell me it’s so you can needle me about a drunken fling that I know you don’t give a—”

“Stiles,” Peter says, his eyes snapping up. He holds Chris’ gaze. “According to you. He asked you.”

After a second, Chris breathes. At a completely normal rate, and not particularly deeply. He bags up the used wipes and other cleaning materials and bundles them into his duffel, and then stands up to do a quick walk about the room.

“Yeah, he did.” There’s a streak of something dark and powdery on the far wall, near where the darach had been standing when the man had attempted to call up termites through one of the floor vents. Chris squints at it, decides it’s not magical and just a scuff from when he swung the guy around, and goes over to give it a couple scrubs with his coat-sleeve. “I was kind of surprised, too, but I guess all the wedding things are keeping him busy. That and whatever the hell you were trying to do on the west side, with that gang of skinwalkers.”

“You know as well as I do that the pack voted on them and agreed we’d wait till we heard back from the regional tribal council,” Peter says, with airy dismissiveness. He shifts in his chair so that he just stays in Chris’ peripheral vision like a persistent, smug shadow. “You _also_ know what I’m really getting at, Chris. Don’t play the idiot, it’s never been your family’s strong point.”

“Yeah, well, making sense only seems to happen when Stiles is threatening you, so I wouldn’t be so sure of myself, I was in your shoes,” Chris mutters. Once he’s scrubbed off the mark, he finishes his walk-around and then comes back to the body. “Whatever you’re insinuating—”

Peter moves abruptly. He pauses, and then a satisfied smile stretches slowly across his face as Chris belatedly shifts his hand from his gun. Then Peter gets up and walks over till he and Chris are facing each other. He takes one more step than anyone else would, putting them indecently close.

And Chris lets it happen because—stupid reasons, pride and things like that. He doesn’t want to show Peter’s getting to him, but just thinking of it like that pretty much gives him away and by the time he realizes _that_ , it’s too late and he and Peter are breathing on each other. Again, he’s getting old.

“You usually pass that sort of thing on to your daughter these days,” Peter says. Pauses, shifting just the smallest degree closer. “She _is_ here already.”

“I had a free afternoon, and darachs can be tricky,” Chris says.

Peter raises his brows. “Still don’t think your daughter’s up for it?”

“I didn’t say—look.” Chris takes a step back. Keeps his eyes level on Peter, till the man looks away, smiling, and then bends down and grabs the shoulder strap of his duffel. “Whatever the hell is going through that twisted place you call your mind, _I_ respect your fiancé. He’s done a hell of a lot, just keeping you from crossing any lines you can’t come back from. I’m not about to ruin things for him.”

“You sound like you think I’m propositioning you,” Peter observes.

Chris can’t help the eye-roll. “So what, were you just asking me whether I remember the time I decided it was against the code to let you accidentally drown in a toilet bowl?”

“First of all, I wasn’t _that_ drunk, and it was your men who screwed up the wolfsbane dosage,” Peter says, a flicker of genuine wounded pride breaking through. But then he snorts and gets his slick face back on, and wags his finger at Chris like he has any hope in a thousand years of ever having the higher moral ground. “Second, I believe we were discussing the fact that you’ve developed a bit of a weakness for, yes, _my_ fiancé.”

“I’m helping him out by keeping you from getting taken out before you two make it to the altar,” Chris says after a second. “I guess yeah, that’s a weakness considering the family code says I should show those who do evil no mercy, but I think we all understand at this point that being realistic means you don’t always take that one literally.”

“Such a martyr, Chris,” Peter sighs, shaking his head. “And here I’d thought that you’d made some progress in seeing the benefits of some flexibility, but it turns out you’re just as stiff-backed as ever.”

Chris slings the duffel over his shoulder, leaning as if he’ll go around Peter from the right, and then he twists left as the door suddenly opens, temporarily distracting the other man. “Peter, I’ll bury this one for you, and for your own good you’d be better off leaving it at that. All right?”

He doesn’t wait to hear the man’s response, just walks out of the room. And promptly runs into Erica, not Alan, and…Chris stifles a curse and then averts his eyes as Laura Hale hastily grabs at the part of her blouse that’s gaping open, thanks to a missing button. Then he has to avert his eyes the other way as Erica, much more lackadaisically, tugs her hair down over some obvious hickeys on the side of her neck.

“Oh, hey, we found Peter,” Erica says, sniffing. “Also, dead person?”

“It’s all right, they were evil,” Peter calls back. “Chris says so.”

Peter aside, Chris actually considers the Hales dependable allies and fairly friendly. They probably aren’t going to ever be each other’s best friends—but then again, you don’t need to be best friends to show the kind of understanding Laura does in her glance at Chris just then. “I thought this was an empty spare,” Laura mutters, and then she grimaces and pulls herself straight. “But anyway, since you’re here, Peter…Stiles is looking for you. Something about the centerpieces?”

“I have to—Deaton—get rid of that guy,” Chris mumbles, quickly walking away.

Thankfully, Deaton’s just the next hall over. Chris tells him to get the body out and then Chris will meet him with the car, and then walks off before Deaton can object. Which isn’t actually sticking it to Deaton, because there are enough pack members in the building to run any interference necessary and the body isn’t that heavy, especially now that it’s stuffed into a bag with handles, and…honestly, Chris doesn’t give a damn. Deaton can deal with that.

Chris tracks down Lydia, and finds her irritably dismissing the florist from the middle of the reception hall. “Does that _look_ like it properly diffuses the wall scone lights in here to you?” she demands of Chris, as soon as she sees him. She jabs her finger at the test garlands the florist hung on the wall. “Really?”

“I have no idea what you’re looking for,” Chris says, with complete honesty.

Lydia stares at him for a few minutes. They’ve all grown, all the kids, but she and Stiles have come along the most obviously, he sometimes thinks. He can still remember when they were posturing high-schoolers, using sarcasm to prop up their courage, and now…now, when Lydia has that flat, cold stare in her eyes, he seriously wonders if there might be a little basilisk mixed in with the banshee.

“What,” she says. “And put it in twenty-five words or less, because Derek is making a hash of dealing with the venue manager and Stiles will _not_ stop tweaking the menu, and I just do not. Have. Bandwidth.”

“Peter just tried to blackmail me into sex with the crush I supposedly have on Stiles,” Chris says. Then he thinks that over. “That’s sixteen.”

Lydia continues to give him that stare. He’s got a grown, married daughter, and centuries of hunting tradition behind him, but when his fingers twitch for his gun, it’s because he’d like something comforting to hold onto.

“The florist is now down an assistant, am I correct?” she finally says. She shifts subtly back, and while there’s a smile on her face, her overall air is much closer to a cobra coiling into strike position. “When they are already a _week_ behind the timeline, and we’re facing shortages of _tulips_ , and get out of here and find me a reliable supplier for lavender.”

Chris leaves. And goes through his contacts list till he finds a hedgewitch who can guarantee a bulk delivery of lavender, and then sits down and hopes to God that Lydia can handle Peter. Because yes, that is in fact better than continuing to cleave to an outdated, inhumane code and a psychotically cruel family.

He just hopes it’s better enough that he’s going to survive this one. It’s been a while since he’s had that kind of doubt—which he fully credits to the kids—but he really does wonder.

* * *

Lydia has taken part in several wedding parties, with varying degrees of responsibility. Which, she’s found, tend to have a direct relationship with the degree of humiliation she suffers. So yes, aside from the obvious general interest in ensuring the pack survives Stiles and Peter’s nuptials, and that Stiles is a very close friend and she cares for his happiness, she has a personal stake in making sure that it goes off without a hitch.

If nothing else, she will not be wearing a dress that forces her to temporarily dye her hair brunette in order for her to stomach walking out in it.

And since she has the power, she decides she might as well make sure that the men also have properly-fitted suits. Peter’s given her a free hand with his share of the Hales’ fortune, so there really is no reason for anybody to show up in a tux out of a disco-era Goodwill.

“It doesn’t look right over the left side,” Lydia says, critically eyeing the hang of the jacket.

The tailor hesitates, then fiddles with a pin. “Well…he is wearing a gun holster on that side.”

“Yes, and?” Lydia says.

To which, of course, the man has nothing to say. He purses his lips a few times, then nods and reaches out, only to draw back as Stiles’ father rolls his shoulders. “It’s kind of tight when I cross my arms, too,” Stiles’ father says, demonstrating. “Right across the back.”

“Considering the minimum cost per square yard of the bolts you showed us, I think that should be fixable, too,” Lydia says to the tailor, just before smiling. “Don’t you think?”

The tailor mumbles an assent, stripping Stiles’ dad of the coat and then taking that off to re-pin its seams. Stiles’ father looks after him with a faintly dismayed expression. “I mean, I hate to be picky—”

“You know if you get so much as a papercut because that suit keeps you from pulling out your gun, Stiles will storm back here and firebomb the place,” Lydia says.

His father grimaces. “Yeah, that’s about where I was going. Well…anyway, it’ll be good to have a suit I can pull out for the next ten or so years.”

Which reminds Lydia. She checks the time on her phone, then takes two steps to the left so that she can see into the short corridor between the dressing rooms. At the very, very far end, Jackson is preening before the three-way mirror, while, seated on an ottoman beside him, Isaac is hunched over his phone. Derek and Scott come into sight a second later, both of them peering at a tablet Scott is holding, in a discussion so deep that neither of them appear to realize that Derek’s practically got his nose in Scott’s ear. And Boyd had to skip because he’s following up on the ice sculptor for Lydia, so…

Lydia snaps her fingers. None of the men react. She snaps them again, and then she takes a deep breath for a scream, but before she can do that, Stiles’ dad taps her on the shoulder. When she looks up at him, he points to his ear and then down the hall, to something half-hidden behind Isaac’s foot.

That something is a small portable vaporizer, and now that she thinks about it, the place is rather strongly scented with lemon verbena. And when she looks at the men again, she realizes they’re all wearing earbuds. Derek and Scott aren’t actually talking to each other; they’re taking turns typing on the tablet.

“Seriously,” Lydia says.

Stiles’ father sighs, sounding just as weary with disbelief as she feels. Then he takes a half-step forward. “Stiles?” he calls.

There’s a loud thump in one of the dressing rooms.

“Stiles,” his dad says more loudly. “Stiles, you know what this reminds me of? I don’t know if you remember about your Aunt Wanda’s wedding, where you were the co-ringbearer? And your mom got you this tiny little suit. I didn’t even think they sold suits for kids that young, and they did, but even so, your mom had to hem the sleeves a good inch and a half—”

Two more thumps, a growl and a muffled curse, and then Stiles stumbles out of the dressing room, yanking his dress shirt down and looking woefully at his father. “Dad,” he says. “Dad, come on.”

“I still have photos somewhere,” his dad goes on in a musing voice. “I really should dig those up, I bet they’d be great in the reception slideshow. You were just the cutest little thing. You kept trying to suck on your tie.”

“ _Dad_ ,” Stiles moans, in the agonized tone of a man whose trouser inseam is rapidly returning to a comfortable fit. “Dad, please, for the love of all that’s decent, stop talking about me as a little kid.”

His father snorts. “Yeah, well, stop running up the dry-cleaning charges here, speaking of decent.”

“This is revenge for—for something I did, isn’t it,” Stiles mutters, reaching back into the dressing room. He hauls Peter, who offers up a blandly confused expression, out of there, and then pushes the other man into the adjoining room. “Okay, okay, I think our suits are good for now. Now what were we—right, the playlist. Isaac, what’s the…Isaac. Isaac.”

He looks at Isaac, who’s still buried in his phone, and then his eyes narrow and he swings over and yanks out one earbud. Isaac yelps and tosses his phone, which arcs through the air to fall on the tablet, knocking that out of Scott’s hand. Derek snatches the tablet before it hits the ground, then turns around with an irritated look on his face just as Stiles frowns and pulls what is clearly Peter’s tie out of his pants. Not out of his pants’ belt-loops—out of his pants.

“Not revenge, son, but I think it’s fair to say this puts us even for a chunk of your childhood,” Stiles’ father mutters, his hand over his eyes, as Derek’s glower turns to horror.

Just then, the tailor comes back with a question for Lydia. She goes with him into the next room to deal with it, and when she comes back, everyone except for Stiles’ dad and Scott has disappeared.

“We figured the fitting was done, so half of us had patrol and Stiles and Peter were going to work on the yellow wolfsbane we keep finding around the school,” Scott explains.

“I know. I have administrator rights over the group calendar,” Lydia reminds him. “I assign the patrols. Including yours.”

Scott winces. He’s still a little too soft-hearted and naïve in his idealism for her tastes, but he’s far from the teenager who was using simplistic morality partly as a way to cover up how uncomfortable he was with just making things up as he went along. He’s an alpha werewolf and he’s grown into it, and so these days he generally does look like his skin fits him. Generally.

“Yeah,” he says, pulling at his hair. “Yeah, um…I know I’m up too, but Boyd’s on his way back and he’ll cover till I get out, and can we talk for a sec?”

Then he glances at Stiles’ father, who’s changed back into his own clothes and who is standing in the corner, frowning at his phone and completely ignoring them. Lydia guesses the man is catching up on work—Parrish swore up and down they wouldn’t call him in short of a serial killer, but Stiles’ dad is just as much of an obsessive as Stiles is. He’s just a little more mature at hiding it.

“Are you and Allison fighting again?” Lydia says, moving Scott back towards the dressing rooms anyway.

Scott looks unconvincingly surprised that she’d ask that. “No. No, we’re fine. Anyway—actually, I wanted to talk about Peter. I think he’s up to something.”

Lydia considers him for a few seconds. His grades might not have always showed it, but Scott’s problem has never been a lack of intelligence. “I believe that that stopped being my problem when we walked in on Stiles blowing Peter while Peter was chained to your—”

“I know, but I just—I don’t really want to go to Stiles, just because it’s…well, it’s…got to do with Allison’s dad too,” Scott says, seesawing between guilt and genuine worry. Then his eyes widen and he grabs at Lydia’s arm. “I mean, I don’t actually think Peter’s cheating on Stiles, I think it’s just him…up to something, and needling Chris, but I just don’t want Stiles to get hurt because somebody was careless. Including us.”

On the other hand, Scott really has improved, and to be honest, Lydia can’t really fault him for not being the type to completely follow machinations on the level of Peter or Stiles. If he was, he wouldn’t be Scott. “Yes, I know, Chris already complained about it to me.”

“Oh,” Scott says, instantly relieved. “Oh, good. Because I really was…Stiles is really jokey about it but them getting married really means a lot, and—”

“Did he complain to you?” Lydia says.

Scott stutters, then blinks rapidly. “Stiles?”

“No, Chris,” Lydia sighs.

Scott resembles a light-blinded deer.

“I didn’t think so, and since I doubt Peter’s taken to confiding in you either, what’s bringing this on?” Lydia asks.

“Oh. Oh, I just…well, Chris has been kind of avoiding everything wedding, and I just…thought it was a little weird,” Scott lies. “He was pretty interested in it before, and now he changes the subject whenever it comes up, and it’s almost like he doesn’t want it to happen. And…and all right, stop looking at me like that, it was really Allison who noticed. And she says she thinks it started after he killed the darach florist, and he and Peter were talking to each other before that.”

Lydia nods. “And she asked you to ask me.”

She’s not expecting Scott to shake his head, but he’s so wrapped up in his own discomfort that he doesn’t notice her surprise. “No. No, she just…mentioned it. And…and we aren’t fighting, we really aren’t, but…we’re kind of talking less and I just thought that it might help her if I looked into things with Chris.” 

“You shouldn’t be busy,” Lydia says, frowning. “I know you had a lot of separate time last month, but I took that into account when I made up the patrol schedules this month.”

“Yeah. Yeah, no, it’s not…it’s okay, it’s just…one of those things you go through, when you’re tog—well, married,” Scott says, with a slight grimace. Then he shakes himself and looks back at her. “Anyway. Thanks for keeping an eye on it, and if you need help—”

“I will tell you, and if you do anything before I do that, I will tell you exactly how badly you’ve screwed it up for me,” Lydia says crisply. 

Scott nods in acknowledgement and thanks her again, and then excuses himself to go start on patrol. Lydia watches him go, then takes her phone out. She means to text Stiles and remind him just how many platters she’s already twirling in the air, but just then somebody clears their throat and she starts.

“Sorry,” Stiles’ dad says. He takes a step over, pauses, and then takes another. “If you’re forgetting who’s around you, I guess I should be telling Jordan we need the wised-up deputies on call this weekend?”

“What? No, no, it’s not one of those. Thank God.” Lydia puts her phone away, considering what she’s just said, and then sighs. “On the other hand, if it were the kind of thing where it was just a matter of fighting tactics, that would be so much easier.”

Stiles’ father grimaces in unison with her. “Okay. I was going to load up on liquor next week, but I guess I can move that up and get you something to take home after the pack meeting.”

Lydia looks at him. “I thought you weren’t going to either one of the parties?”

“Because I’m not,” Stiles’ dad says. “My son’s grown, thank everyone and everything, and he’s going to marry the man he wants to marry, and I think now’s as good a time as any to step back and let him live his life and be able to have the choice to write off whatever I hear as unreliable witnesses. So I was gonna get a nice Scotch and stay in and catch up on my movies.”

He smiles as he says it, equal parts wry and affectionate and pleasantly anticipatory, and Lydia ends up smiling a little too, though she suspects her expression is a little more wistful. Of course, then her phone buzzes, recalling her to the numerous near-disasters cooking on her agenda.

“Well, appealing as that sounds, I think alcohol would negatively affect my ability to make sure Stiles living his life doesn’t end up in same-night visits to the morgue and the jail,” Lydia mutters, checking her texts. She bites back some vicious language as that damn florist comes up with yet another supply problem—she understands flowers are perishable, but their availability isn’t _completely_ unpredictable, not at their price point.

“Yeah, all right, but just don’t kill yourself, Lydia,” Stiles’ father says. He sounds serious enough to make her look up again, and he actually is that serious. “I know you want to do it right for Stiles, but you know he’s letting you because he thinks you’re having fun. If he starts thinking otherwise, he’ll step in.”

“I know. I know, and I do appreciate that,” Lydia says, looking back at him. “But honestly, it’s fine. It is fun, and anyway, I have time on my hands.”

“Really? I thought you usually have that thing with Jackson’s mother that ramps up around now, that fundraiser,” Stiles’ dad says. Then he leans back a little, and then winces and lifts a hand to rub at the side of his face. “And I can tell from your face that I just stuck my foot in my mouth, and…sorry, I’m guessing I missed something in the pack again.”

Lydia blinks, then shakes her head and puts her hand out to touch Stiles’ dad’s arm to reassure him. “No, not really. It’s not like we made an announcement—or thought we needed one, but that’s the problem with forgetting not everyone has super senses of smell…anyway, Jackson and I haven’t really been on the same road for a while now.”

“Oh. Oh, no, I kind of saw that, I just thought—I don’t know, thought you were still trying to keep it looking like you were,” Stiles’ father says awkwardly. “You were still having dinner with his parents.”

“Oh, _that_. No, that was just his father, needing another prop for his business dinners, and Jackson is still a friend, and pack, and well, you didn’t think that Erica was going to put up with that, did you?” Lydia says.

“Erica?” Stiles’ dad echoes, a little puzzled. But then he shrugs it off. “Well, all right, that makes sense.”

“That said, my help doesn’t extend to that ridiculously overdressed excuse for charity work,” Lydia snorts. “At least planning Stiles’ wedding means I am, in fact, saving lives.”

Stiles’ father laughs warmly. Then he leans over, slinging his arm around her shoulders, and gives her a quick hug. He’s always been _Stiles’_ father, and he’s had the decency to not ever patronize any of them by pretending otherwise, but over the years he’s managed to let them know that he cares too, and not just because Stiles does.

“Well, just watch yourself,” he says, letting her go. “At the end of the day, I think Stiles will just be happy with having people happy, you know, and not with all the extra stuff. Even if the suits are pretty damn good, Lydia.”

He has to go back to the station at that point, and Lydia still has to wrap up with the tailor. But that was…it was just nice of him, Lydia thinks. Nice.

She lets the tailor get two minutes into an attempt to upsell her on shoes, that’s how nice it is. Then she gets hold of herself, but still, she thinks, she did need that.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If anyone's interested, I imagine that in this 'verse, Peter still spent years in a coma, because with Derek and Laura staying in town, they would keep an eye on who got into his room, and Stiles is good but even he can't go straight to magically reversing that kind of damage as a preteen. But when Peter finally did wake up, he was a lot saner than in canon, and he wasn't going to be as mad at Laura and Derek for trying to leave versus actually leaving.
> 
> And yes, Stiles' father ended up learning about werewolves very early on.


	3. Chapter 3

“Bro, of course Stiles caught on, if you were any more obvious, you’d be skinning deer and doodling your names with hearts around them with the blood on the hides,” Laura says, carrying in another crate of liquor.

Derek watches her set it down next to the towering pile already in the room, then resettles himself on the…it’s a weird couch. Fine, so the kind of place this is, he wasn’t expecting beige leather with a ten-year warranty, but it just feels weird. The red velvet is so thick that when you sit on it, you think you’re sinking in, and then you get through the plush and actually hit the cushion itself and you almost grab for the table because you have another two inches to drop. And don’t get him started on the faint odors drifting off it.

“You know even feral omegas don’t act like that,” Derek says. “I’m not ten, you can’t just pull stuff out of one of your ridiculous YA series and convince me that’s actual werewolf lore.”

“Yeah, yeah, you can tell Scott now and he’ll take it so seriously he’ll get Stiles to check it out without laughing himself to death at you. Also, you’re ducking my point, and as your big sister and your first alpha, I care about you, Derek,” Laura says. She pokes through the crate, occasionally picking up a bottle to check it over, and then gives him a stern look over one. “More importantly, I care about the fact that, for whatever reason, Peter hasn’t done anything about this yet—”

“Maybe he doesn’t know. I don’t think I’m being that obvious,” Derek mutters.

“Is this about Dreamy True Alpha and Action Girl Hunter and their marriage falling apart?” Cora says, walking in with a…a…flesh-colored oblong thing under her arm that Derek refuses to look at closely. “Laura! You said you were gonna wait till he was too drunk to run off! You owe me, you two tried to run off without me!”

Laura rolls her eyes. “We are _so_ over that guilt trip, munchkin, and I was, but if Stiles is moving in on this, we gotta move faster. Which is my _point_ , Derek. Peter’s not, so Stiles must be stopping him, so do you really want to find out what Stiles wants to do with this?”

“Instead of finding out what you’re going to do with it?” Derek says.

His sisters turn as one and look at him, silently daring him to choose, and he…is going to need a lot longer than a minute to figure out which option is worse. Honestly, he’s probably going to need a day or so just to list out all the pros and cons, and he might even have to map it in one of those spreadsheets that Lydia’s terrified them all into learning how to put together, and…he’s not getting a choice. He never gets a choice. That’s his life.

“Their marriage is not falling apart,” Derek finally says. “Allison’s family tried to kill Scott, and then they tried to kill his mom, then they went after everybody else, and _then_ they were going to help destroy the town. And Scott and Allison got married after all of that, so I think they’re going to last.”

“Why does he always miss the point?” Cora says, looking at Laura, who shrugs. “Aren’t you supposed to fix that?”

“What, because I’m an alpha? That doesn’t give you the ability to totally revamp somebody’s personality,” Laura says, frowning back at her.

Derek puts his head in his hands. “Sometimes Peter actually is less sadistic than you two.”

“Look, Derek, kidding aside, I’m just trying to say, you can’t just sit on this forever,” Laura sighs. “One way or the other, you’re gonna get hurt if you do that, so…well, first of all, I think you need to stop acting like this isn’t even a thing for you. And then, once you do that, you—”

“Hey, which room are we?” comes Allison’s voice from the hall.

Laura winces, while Cora gives the doorway a speculative look that has Derek tensing on the couch. Give her credit, for all her teasing, Laura catches it and grabs Cora’s elbow and holds firmly onto it as she goes over and calls Allison to the room. Then she drags Cora out with her, loudly saying that they’re going to check the back exits and figure out where the fire extinguishers are.

Allison doesn’t bat an eye and just carries in a big box that turns out to have the contents of the gift bags they’ll have to assemble: Pop Rocks, mini-bottles of soda, a flesh-colored balloon for each bag that’s labeled ‘stomach,’ and little cards printed with legal liability disclaimers. “They just don’t want to do these, do they?” she says, glancing at the door.

Derek doesn’t answer because he’s already accidentally clawed himself trying to curl some ribbon to tie around the bags. He twists his hand away so the blood won’t fall on the gift bags, then swears and hastily jerks his finger into his mouth. The couch already smells weird enough, and it’s another werewolf myth that making everything smell like themselves always makes a werewolf feel better.

“If I was a less nice person, I’d call stereotyping,” Allison adds, shaking out the bag of balloons. “These are for the reception guests, so isn’t it a little weird that we’re doing all of them and the guys just have to do the bags for Peter’s party? I heard Peter isn’t even really doing gift bags, he just ordered everybody engraved glasses and a bottle of fancy liquor.”

“If you were getting married, would you want Jackson or Isaac to do your gift bag?” Derek says, before he can think.

Allison laughs, because when she’s not trying to kill you, she actually is a nice person, but she looks a little distant when she’s doing it, and not exactly in a good way. “Okay, good point. But then, we just went the hippy route and got everybody little pots of herbs, because we were short on time and money and I’m not really any good at big parties. And they got all wrecked anyway when Scott’s dad showed up, and sometimes I think we should’ve just given people dry-cleaning vouchers.”

She’s unfolding bags as she talks, snapping those open and then setting them down in perfect little lines on the table. Derek looks at her face, and then at the stiff way her hands are moving, and presses his lips together and just cuts ribbon.

“Sorry,” Allison says abruptly. “I’m dumping on you. And this probably isn’t where I should be griping about wedding stuff.”

Derek shrugs. “It’s not my wedding.” He decides he’s got enough strips and tosses the ribbon spool aside, and then drums his fingers instead of reaching for the Pop Rocks. “Something up?”

“Not really. Well. God, I don’t know, I just…so Scott’s mom might be seeing somebody again,” Allison sighs. She stops with the bags and slouches back and just stares at them for a few seconds. Then she shakes her head. She narrows her eyes and lifts her finger and silently counts, then rolls her eyes and grabs five bags to refold. “We are ninety-nine percent sure he’s not supernatural evil, and based on the two lunches and one afternoon repainting Mrs. McCall’s porch I’ve spent with him, he seems like an okay guy.”

“Scott think so too?” Derek says, finally grabbing the candy. He sifts through a handful, trying to remember if anybody told him how many need to go into each, and then pulls out his phone and runs a search on his Lydia texts.

Allison makes a face. Then tries to hide it. Then gives up and rubs her hand over her face. “I have no idea. It’s just—you’ve known him almost as long as I have, Derek, do you ever feel like…like the more you know him, the less you know him?”

Derek doesn’t want to pretend like he didn’t hear her, but he has no idea how to answer that. So he grunts and fiddles with his phone.

“I mean, I know, it’s Scott, not Stiles. Scott’s not exactly the mysterious type—he still can’t even lie that well. But it’s just, I feel like we have the same conversations about the same things over and over again, and when we do, he’s not lying to me. He means everything he says. But…but we’re having the _same_ conversations,” Allison says, frustration visible in every line of her, and every word she flings out of her mouth. “We’re not kids in high school now, we’re married, and we have a mortgage, and—and I don’t want him to be different, I love him like he is, but at the same time it’s just—it’s weird, and am I making any sense at all?”

She looks right at him, which…well, he’s grunted at other people anyway, but Derek chokes that back and just stops himself from squirming. He can’t help glancing at his phone; he did at least find the right text from Lydia, he absently notes. “Honestly, not…really, but I can get that you don’t feel like—like you guys are talking when you’re talking. Which is basically every conversation I have with Stiles or my uncle.”

“Well, I don’t think Scott and me are trying to do this to each other on purpose,” Allison says, smiling wryly. She turns back to the bags, lifting her hands like she’s going to tie a piece of ribbon to the handle of one, and then she puts her hands down and by then her smile’s already gone. “I guess this is just what they mean about marriage being an endurance thing.”

“Then I think you’ll be fine,” Derek says, just as somebody turns into the hall at the far end. It’s not one of the girls—they’re all wearing some kind of heel and the step doesn’t click. “Scott’s not going anywhere any time soon…going to check this, be back in a second.”

He gets up from the table, trying to prepare himself, and Allison moves out of the way for him. But then she grabs his wrist for a second and thanks him for listening, and it’s quick, doesn’t even slow him down, but when Peter shows up in the doorway Derek knows he doesn’t have his expression locked down.

“What are you doing?” Derek snaps. “You’re not supposed to be here.”

Peter doesn’t even attempt to look annoyed. He just stands there till Derek pushes him back into the hall, throwing smirky glances between Derek and Allison and damn it, Laura was right. “I’m not supposed to be at his _party_ ,” Peter corrects. “Seeing as the party isn’t for a few more days, and this _is_ my fiancé we’re talking about, I think it’s not only permissible, but in fact, prudent for me to come and inspect the premises.”

“Ha ha ha,” Derek says flatly, walking Peter another foot down the hall. “Stiles said if you showed up, I was allowed to beat you up to get you out of here.”

“Derek, really, I thought we were past that. One happily reconciled family, no longer holding grudges about who tried to leave who because who decided to compound poor judgment with terrible leadership,” Peter says, shaking his head.

“Yeah, we are,” Derek says. Because, all the bickering aside, they actually do have each other’s back these days, and even Laura thinks that Peter doesn’t do that _only_ because Stiles makes him. “But that doesn’t mean I don’t like beating you up.”

Peter puts on the disappointed face he’s used ever since the first time he caught Derek and Cora sneaking into his room and realized they were just after his chocolate stash, not the magic books he wasn’t supposed to have. “Nephew.”

“Uncle,” Derek mutters.

There’s an echo from further down the hall, and then Cora comes in, with Scott just behind her, carrying a double armful of shovels. “Uncle, seriously, just because you’re going to the boring party doesn’t mean you get to crash ours,” Cora says.

“It’s not going to be boring,” Scott protests. The shovels shift in his arms and he awkwardly tries to compensate, then hisses as the top one starts to slide beyond his fingers.

Cora just stands there, so Derek sighs and shoulders Peter out of the way and grabs the shovel before it falls. “Were we supposed to get these?” Derek says, looking at it.

“No, this isn’t for the party, but keep that,” Cora says. Now she takes a shovel, and then a second one that she carries into the room, where Allison’s asking what’s going on. “We gotta rebury this thing in the basement.”

Peter perks up, but when he reaches for a shovel, Scott swerves the remaining ones away from him. Scott looks apologetic about it, though his eyes are a little on the red side, and stay like that till Peter holds up both hands and showily steps back to Derek’s side.

“Lydia says she’ll brief people at the pack meeting, and you were supposed to be convincing Stiles to cut out more of the videogame theme songs from the playlist five minutes ago,” Scott says. “Anyway, it’s not really that big of a thing. It’s just…kind of weirdly-shaped. So, um, Laura and I could use a hand.”

“Tell me this thing wasn’t supposed to work the wedding,” Derek says.

Scott sighs. “I think it’ll be okay, it can’t be that hard to find another bartender. Right?”

Just then, Allison and Cora come out of the room. Allison’s got her shovel tucked under her arm as she rolls up her sleeves, but she’s not paying enough attention to where she’s going and nearly smacks the blade into Scott’s hip. Scott is already stepping out of the way, but Allison notices and yelps and grabs up the shovel, and then jerks it back down as she almost knocks a hole in the wall.

“Careful,” Scott says.

She looks irritably at him, then grimaces. “Yeah,” she says.

They look at each other, and then look away at the same time. It’s incredibly awkward to watch, but at the same time, Derek thinks, the proof for how well they go together is in how identical their pained expressions are.

“You come down too late and we’re gonna leave you the sticky tentacles,” Cora says to him and Derek, pulling Allison off by the arm.

“Tentacles?” Derek says.

He can’t go after her because Scott steps in front of him. “Sorry, sorry, I just need to—” Scott stoops and pulls off his jacket, and then straightens up while double-fisting the last two shovels “—I know it sounds bad, but it’s…it’s…well, there’s a lot of us, that should help.”

“Yeah, great. Good thing we picked a place with showers in the back,” Derek mutters, stripping off his own coat. Then he frowns as Scott checks his phone and his expression turns unusually frustrated. “Hey, look, we can probably deal with it if Lydia’s ordering you off somewhere.”

“What? No, that’s not…it’s just I was thinking about surprising Allison with dinner tonight,” Scott mutters, shoving his phone away. “We haven’t really done that in a while, and…I think we’re going to be too tired at this point. I guess maybe this weekend—oh, wait. Never mind.”

Derek ignores Peter’s wounded huff, because Peter was absolutely about to remind Scott that this weekend is the party weekend, and Scott doesn’t need that. “Erica’s supposed to show up in half an hour,” Derek says. “I’ll text her to come earlier, I don’t think she’s doing anything important. She owes everybody for being late to patrol this week anyway, so why don’t you just grab Allison now and go?”

“But she’s got stuff,” Scott says. “She’s gonna—”

“Okay, fine, so I was supposed to get the food for the pack meeting but you guys can do it instead, and at least eat at the supermarket deli while you’re doing that,” Derek says. “That actually isn’t a lie, somebody has to do it, and I’ll just stay longer here instead.”

“Really?” Scott says after a second. He likes the idea a lot, but Derek can tell he’s fighting back his reflex to say he can’t put Derek through all that trouble.

“Yeah, I think the deli people hate me anyway,” Derek says. “Every time I go, they short us on the veggie platter.”

“I’m sure they don’t hate you. Maybe they just don’t think you look like the celery type?” Scott says, starting to smile. He sets the shovels down and grabs his coat, and then, after a second of hesitation, steps into the room to get Allison’s purse. “Well, thanks, I seriously owe you.”

“Ah, the sweet sound of a future favor falling into place,” Peter says, just as Scott gets out of earshot. His arm drops down over Derek’s shoulders, then sticks there no matter how much Derek tries to shrug him off. “Not that my martyring nephew’s going to ever try and call that one in.”

“Couldn’t you be having sex with Stiles right now?” Derek mutters. He considers his shovel, but…no, really wouldn’t be worth it. The trouble with the rest of the pack aside, he actually thinks he’d miss Peter. He resents that fact, but he’s long since come to realize that that alone isn’t going to change reality.

Peter laughs and then, thankfully, lets Derek go. “Yes, yes, I can always do that. Which to some people, might make it a meaningful sacrifice when I choose not to, and instead wonder when _will_ the rest of my family start making sensible life decisions.”

“Says the man who thought it was a great idea to flush out Kate Argent’s accomplices by luring her back to town,” Derek snorts. “Look, whatever you’re going to say, Laura’s already bugging me—”

“I don’t doubt it, but she’s probably telling you to just do something or you’ll regret it,” Peter says. “Not my style, you know that.”

“No, your style is more, let’s come up with an elaborate plan to make this about me, screw up, and make it up to Stiles with lots of sex,” Derek says.

Peter looks like he’s not sure whether to be insulted or smug. He eventually settles on frustrated. “Derek. Just a small, small piece of advice, which I know you’ll ignore but which I’ll say anyway, because if nothing else, I am tired of seeing you forget just what family you come from. Giving somebody an audience is all well and good, but you’re not _really_ being much of a listener unless you actually hear what they’re saying.”

“I need to go bury a bartender with tentacles,” Derek says after a long moment. He takes one of the shovels Scott left and pointedly hefts that and the one he already had. “Did you hear _that_?”

Sighing, Peter shakes his head. “Show a wolf the moon, can’t make him howl,” the man mutters, finally leaving.

“Good, somebody here’s got working ears,” Derek says, off to the basement.

* * *

“No, reports have been pretty slow. Nothing bigger than a couple disorderly conduct citations this week,” John says, before biting off a piece of his sandwich. “You?”

“Same, pretty much,” Chris says.

John nods. “Think that’s a bad sign?”

Chris glances over, and John makes an impatient motion with his shoulders, as if somehow Chris is supposed to predict the action for the next couple weeks just based on that. Don’t get Chris wrong, he fully appreciates the value of having the local law enforcement, as well as the one of the few restraining forces on Stiles, in the know and on his side. More than that, he appreciates having at least one other person who’s going to understand why, when the patrol schedule gets divvied up, he’s absolutely going to pull rank to get out of the wet, rainy nights that make his knee act up.

But Jesus, sometimes John lays too much on the whole hunter training idea. “I think we’re all working hard to make sure it’s not,” Chris finally says.

“Huh. That’s an early start to the cryptic stuff,” John says, picking up his sandwich. “Guess I’ll just go see how Melissa and Lydia are doing with the hospital stats, if you’re going to be like that.”

Chris frowns, because honestly, that is literally what the pack is doing. And he didn’t think he sounded that snide either, and between Stiles, Peter, and his own daughter, he’s pretty sure he knows snide. “What…”

But by then, John’s already halfway across the living room. Melissa looks up and sees him coming, and he stands by her chair and chats while she clears off some papers to make room for his plate. She grabs one and Lydia reaches over and has her put it back down; Melissa’ brows fly up and she delicately withdraws her hand, happening to share a tolerant look with Chris as she does.

John seems pretty amused too, though once he gets his plate down, he ducks back over to a drawer and takes out a couple small bottles. He offers one to Melissa, who looks equal parts gleeful and scandalized, and then sticks the other one in Lydia’s purse. Lydia glances over, arches a brow, and then goes back to her laptop screen.

“Okay, I am worried now, when the parents are bribing Lydia is when bad, bad things are coming down the pipeline,” says a voice behind Chris. “Or when somebody’s about to get dragged into an embarrassing family event, which, depending on the family, could actually have more collateral damage.”

Chris smiles before he thinks about it. Then he does, and as he turns towards Stiles, he takes a quick look around. Thankfully, Peter doesn’t appear to be anywhere in sight, and Chris also doesn’t see any of the usual suspects—Derek, Erica, Jackson—for when Peter’s strong-armed somebody else into doing his dirty work.

“ _Or_ this whole wedding is going worse than I thought, and Peter and I better just grab the paperwork and get it done on the way to the bunker,” Stiles adds, coming up to the kitchen table.

“I think that’s going okay,” Chris mutters, looking away. He picks up his sandwich, but pauses to knock the ketchup towards Stiles when he sees the man’s piling up on the fries. “I haven’t been around much, but I don’t see any—”

“Yeah, you haven’t.” Stiles squirts a good helping of ketchup onto the rim of his plate, then drags a fry through it and pops that into his mouth as he looks up. He lets the fry hang halfway out of his mouth, lips pursed around it, eyes wide with curiosity. Then he sucks in that fry and picks up a second one to jab at Chris. “So what are _you_ hiding from?”

Chris opens and closes his mouth a couple times. Then he realizes how bad that looks, and when he’s got a goddamned sandwich right there he could be better utilizing, and…hell, he’s getting slow on his feet, metaphorical and otherwise.

“Okay. Sorry, that came out kind of grumpy,” Stiles says, suddenly folding up all that overt suspicion into a sheepish smile. He waves his hand at Chris, then leans across the table to get at the guacamole. “I’ve been spending way too much time with Derek lately, I think. Anyway, how are things, really? Did you wrap up that thing with the Washington people?”

“Yeah, they’re fine, they were just worried about migration season. Turns out they just had to handle a wendigo some idiot rancher imported and they’re short-handed,” Chris says. Slowly, letting his nerves ease back down to some semblance of relaxed. He’s already given away enough without jumping and twitching the game into view.

Stiles doesn’t usually even need that much to put things together, which was one reason why Chris actually _has_ been avoiding the pack—not neglecting, that’s not the same thing, and since most of them are wrapped up in wedding planning, somebody had better be tracking down those border run-ins. Lydia hasn’t said a thing either, though the next time he opened the patrol calendar after their talk, he noticed she’d positioned Peter and him on beats as geographically distant as the town’s size would allow. But anyway, it just…seemed like a better idea to keep his head down till Peter’s little obsession blew over.

Unfortunately, Chris can’t avoid the pack meetings. He did think about coming in just before the actual business started, skipping all the socializing, but decided that that would just send up more red flags than it’d avoid. Allison’s already been asking him careful questions, and he thinks he’s caught Scott eyeing him, and if there’s somebody worse than Peter for prying into Chris’ life, it’s Scott, however well-intentioned Scott is.

“Oh, good, glad to hear that,” Stiles says, munching through some guacamole-laden potato chips. “Because if that got any further along, I was gonna say, Chris, I don’t care if it’s some bullshit leftover from your dad’s time, we’re covering you and Washington can just deal, and so can your pride or whatever was keeping you from mentioning it to the pack.”

Which is right about when Chris was freezing anyway, because he’d been so worried he’d actually _forgotten_ nobody was supposed to know about his argument with the Yakima hunters except for Allison, and shit. “Stiles.”

“Yeah, yeah, it’s not on the agenda, we’ll let you just tuck that one under the bed,” Stiles says cheerfully. He wipes off his mouth with the back of his hand, then gives Chris a pat each on the shoulder and elbow and backs away from the table. “I mean, I think Lydia’s gonna have a _word_ later, sorry, just gonna have to leave you with that, but I get it, you know? We all have stuff like that. Just, no way you get to get yourself killed with it _at least_ till after the reception.”

Chris opens his mouth, nearly gets into another one of those gasping-fish impressions, and then just…sucks it up and thanks Stiles, because yeah, he gets it. He gets it, and is genuinely grateful for it, and God, he’s in the shit. This…this goddamn _wedding_.

Small mercies, it’s only another couple minutes before the meeting really gets started. Peter finally shows up, promptly monopolizing the armchair Stiles has taken and causing Laura to toss them an afghan to hide the hands, but Chris manages to stay across the room and just far enough off Peter’s direct line of sight that the man can’t look at him without other people noticing.

“Immediate business,” Lydia says crisply. “Two omegas this month. One was just vacationing. The other is homeless and appears to have a mental health issue of some kind, and Melissa is running them through the hospital’s program while Scott and Deaton locate a pack to take them in.”

“Alan’s got a couple candidates already, and we’re just sorting out transportation,” Scott pipes up. Then he gives Laura a nod, as the older alpha.

“No family history that’s gonna get in the way, for once,” Laura adds.

Lydia types on her laptop. “Patrols were clear, nothing in the rumor mill besides the old ones about the yellow wolfsbane. That’s still being cleared up, but it looks like the existing supply has finally run out.”

“One guy picked up for suspected drug abuse,” John says. “Jordan and I pulled him and got him detoxed and sent him on his way. And I understand the school’s almost finished with the process of firing Leary.”

“Great,” Lydia says. “Anything anyone wants to bring up?”

Erica, who’s sitting on an uncomfortable-looking Jackson’s lap, raises her hand. “Boyd and I were over in Delapore to pick up the fountain—”

“We’re not on wedding yet,” Lydia says.

“And this isn’t about the wedding,” Erica shoots back. “This is about we went out to lunch while we were at it, and ran into everybody’s favorite set of mighty morphin’ twins. Aiden says hi, by the way.”

“Of course he does,” Jackson sneers. Then he yelps and jerks his head down, rubbing at where Erica’s just elbowed him. “God, what do you care—ow! Ow!”

Lydia reluctantly taps her pen against the top of her laptop, getting Erica’s attention. “Please don’t bleed on the couch, the dry-cleaning funds are low this month,” she says. “Since _someone_ can’t stop getting protein stains on their suits.”

“What? So Peter rocks three-pieces,” Stiles says, looking up. “Also, I thought those guys headed east.”

“Yeah, they did, but now they’re back, and they’re looking to stay ‘cause they got jobs and also affiliated with the Sweetwater pack, and they wanna know if that’s cool with us,” Erica says. “Also, they say congrats on the engagement.”

“Really?” Stiles says, dropping some of his suspiciousness. “That’s…actually kind of nice, I was pretty sure they still thought I was the sidekick when they left, and—and didn’t we invite the Sweetwater people?”

Lydia already is pinching the bridge of her nose, wearing the specific stab-happy look she puts on for anything to do with the seating plan. “Yes. Yes, we did. So you—oh, fine, let’s go to wedding items. So before we get into the twins, let’s—”

“We need to talk about the flowers,” Peter immediately says. “Lydia, my dear, I fully appreciate all of your efforts, and I know that working with that incompetent excuse for a gardener isn’t easy, but we really can’t just—”

“I am not redoing the centerpieces for the _eleventh_ time just because their components no longer allow you to whip up a sleeping potion,” Lydia snaps.

“Why would you need that?” Chris can’t help saying.

Peter’s eyes flick to him and then a broad smile starts to spread across his face. But, thank everything, before Peter can actually say anything, John jumps in. “I thought Melissa was getting tranquilizers from the hospital pharmacy anyway.”

“Yeah, she is,” Stiles says, shooting Peter a look. When Peter sighs and lets his shoulders sink, Stiles softens enough to lean over and rub his hand up and down Peter’s thigh. “I know, I was kind of excited too, but realistically, if we gotta, it’s faster to break out the syringes rather than steep and strain out the punch bowl.”

“Stop looking like that, we told you a zillion times everybody _here_ is going BYOB,” Isaac mutters to an increasingly nervous Jackson. “Don’t tell me Danny did _all_ of that for you in high school, too.”

Lydia, buried in her laptop, raises her hand and clicks her pen to get everybody’s attention. Her purse is stuffed between her and Melissa and its top has slumped so that Chris can glimpse some of the contents, and there are now _two_ little bottles—and when Chris thinks to watch for it, he catches John sneaking a third to Melissa to stick in there. “Moving on. Things that are finalized: food, suits, rehearsal dinner and wedding schedules. Things still in process: flowers, which we have _finished_ talking about tonight, reception schedule and playlist. Things that are overdue: official guest count, DJ contract, photographer.”

“I thought you handled the photographer,” Stiles says, frowning at Peter. “You said your family had this guy who they’ve been using for a century and a half—”

“Yeah,” Laura breaks in, before Peter can gear up with more than a strained chuckle. “We did. But I called him and he was cool right up till I told him which of us was tying the knot, and then he started screaming something about prom photos and eldritch horrors.”

Stiles stares at Peter, who holds his bluffing smile for another second, then sighs. “I had a pimple on the side of my jaw, and I told him very clearly to shoot the other side, and he somehow managed to not only do that, he botched the eye filter in such a way that there was a halo around the pimple instead of my eyes,” Peter mutters.

“So now we don’t have a photographer?” Stiles says, his voice rising. How much it does catches even him by surprise; his shoulders hunch up, insecure in a way he rarely shows these days, but he’s still looking at Peter in irritation. “I—look, I don’t mean this to be a huge deal, but—the photographer is kind of important, Peter. We got my super hardcore Catholic great-aunt to _not_ fly out from Poland only because Dad told her we’d get her photos and prove that gay weddings don’t immediately fall into a sea of hellfire, and—and could you not have mentioned this a little earlier?”

“I’m sorry, I honestly forgot,” Peter says. He is in earnest, and not just because he’s trying to avert risk to himself. His hand comes up and almost touches Stiles’ arm and then hesitantly moves back. “Prom was a difficult time in my life, and I had issues with quite a few people. But I’ll start making calls and I’m sure we’ll find someone.”

“Alan might know somebody,” Scott suggests.

Chris has a good think about what he’s about to say, and then he bites down on his screaming instincts and clears his throat. “I can get someone,” he says. “They’re not a hunter or a druid, and I’ll vouch for them.”

“Their lack of psychosis, or their portfolio?” Lydia immediately says.

“The first one. I’ll get you some samples so you can see for yourself,” Chris says, stepping backwards.

He goes in the kitchen so he can curse himself while emailing his contact. Somebody comes after him, but he finishes and sends the email before he looks up.

Turns out it’s two people: Allison, who gives him a smile and a hug as she grabs the dessert platter and goes back into the other room, and John, who stands in the doorway and looks thoughtfully at him. “Scott’s a good kid, but I guess being your son-in-law hasn’t taught him much about who to trust.”

“Is that supposed to be an insult?” Chris sighs. “Look, John, I’m a little tired today, so if you have something—”

“Are they doing all right?” John says, dropping his voice and looking over his shoulder.

Chris follows his line of sight to where Allison’s picking out a brownie cookie for Scott, who’s just grabbed what looks like a snickerdoodle for himself. They freeze awkwardly, and then Scott smiles and takes the second cookie from her. “If my daughter wants some help, she’ll let me know, but till she does, I told her I’d let them work things out.”

“Okay. I understand that,” John says. He takes another step in, apparently going for the dips, and then shakes his head. “For the record, I wasn’t poking at you. I just wonder about Scott sometimes. Sure, Deaton’s turned out all right, but pulling in more druids…anyway, look, I was just asking. This wedding’s got everybody running around like crazy.”

“Well, you seem to be doing all right,” Chris says, regarding the other man. Admittedly, he hasn’t been around much, but he remembers fretting nights away over stupid things like tablecloth deliveries for Allison’s wedding, and here John is, grazing placidly on the veggie sticks.

“Yeah, well, I’m here for them, but till they ask, I think I’m helping out best by just staying out of the way and running patrols. And if that’s a little self-serving, I’ll take it,” John says, picking out a handful of carrots. He turns back, then pauses, looking at Chris. “Not that that doesn’t mean I’m not keeping an eye on my son.”

“Something up with him?” Chris says, blinking.

John studies him. At first the man looks annoyed, and then he shifts to peer closer and he starts looking disbelieving. Then he’s back to annoyed and he sticks with that as he stalks out of the kitchen.

“You’re a grown man, Chris,” he mutters. “Just do me a favor and remember that, would you?”

“Sure,” Chris says blankly. For a second he wonders what brought that on, and if he should try and dig into it.

And then Boyd appears in the doorway and tells him Lydia wants the photographer’s details, and Chris decides that that’s probably more likely to kill him so he’ll deal with it first. Because if there was anything he learned from Allison’s wedding, it was that prioritization is the only way anybody survives. That, and a damn good wet bar at the reception.

Shit, right. That stuff about the tranquilizers. Chris makes a note to himself to stop by the liquor store on his way home, and then steps back into the living room.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A popular food urban legend is the one claiming that if you eat Pop Rocks and soda together, your stomach will blow up. This has been disproved all over the place, but most notably on the _Mythbusters_ show.
> 
> Bartender = Cthulhu minion.
> 
> Leary is a call-out to Timothy Leary, godfather of LSD.


	4. Chapter 4

“Deaton’s parked out in the preserve with Parrish, and all the speedtraps tonight are set to also cover any suspicious vehicles coming into town, right?” Lydia says. “I already made it clear to Laura that she’s the designated sober person in that party, and I don’t think we need to worry about Scott on that.”

“No, but what about Peter?” Stiles’ father says, sitting down on the couch next to her. He puts his mug on the table and then looks at the grid of the town she has up on the laptop. “Did you put trackers on all of them?”

Lydia raises her brow. “Well, I’m not going to either, what did you think I was going to do?”

“Hijack some security cameras, but I’m betting you did…yep, thought so,” he says, as she maximizes the feed windows. “Anyway. I know Peter loves Stiles more than anything, but.”

“That’s fine, I made Chris join that party so he’ll keep an eye on them,” Lydia says. She sits back and then stifles a grimace as her spine twinges. She didn’t think she’d been sitting on the couch for that long—this has probably been the least intense night she’s had since they started signing contracts for the wedding—but suddenly her body feels rickety and sore, as if she’s been running patrols. “And before you say anything, yes, I’m aware there’s a little issue there and I think that’s all the more incentive for him to stay sober and alert, and to make sensible decisions.”

“Well, you’re on it,” Stiles’ dad says. He lets her rub at her back for a few seconds, then swings his arm out to offer her something.

A bowl of dark chocolate ice cream. With, she discovers when she takes a bite, a liberal amount of alcohol, probably bourbon or something rough-edged like that, mixed into it. And as she takes a second bite, Stiles’ father slouches back and turns on the TV to show the Netflix menu. He kicks his feet up onto the coffee table, and then uses one to nudge the laptop back from where he’s bumped it.

“Sorry,” he says. “So what do you think? Comedy?”

“God, no, we’re close enough to _Spinal Tap_ as it is,” Lydia mutters.

He looks at her. “Stiles made you watch that.”

“He did,” Lydia says. “He said it would explain everything about his sense of humor.”

“Okay, then,” he says, very carefully, around the laugh that is clearly bursting to get out of him. He juggles the remote, then lifts it towards the TV. “Crime-family drama it is.”

“Just pick one where they’re not so stupid I could take over in five minutes,” Lydia says. She eats another spoonful of ice cream. “Ten minutes, at least. That’s all I’m asking for.”

“Well, I’ll see what I can do,” he says.

* * *

Scott’s ended up being a good alpha. He’s got all their backs, and not only that, he’ll go out of his way to make their lives easier, even if that ends up screwing him. Also, even though he’s one of their best fighters, he tries his best to solve things peacefully first and, having seen the kind of crazy psycho killer alphas other packs have, that’s kind of a big one for Boyd. So maybe it doesn’t always work, and maybe Scott goes to that well a little too often, but all in all, Boyd thinks he’d rather yell at Scott for being too easy on evil people than be constantly thrown into suicide missions by the man.

What Scott’s not good at, unfortunately, is throwing a party.

“Okay, so it’s going to be a pretty long night, so I thought we’d start off a little slow and build up our strength,” Scott says, walking them into their private room. “We’ll eat—the bar is open—and do the toasts—”

“So why isn’t Derek here again?” Isaac mutters to Boyd. “Shouldn’t he do that? Or his sisters. Why aren’t they here? None of us are standing up on Peter’s side.”

“Because Stiles decided he got all the girls, even though we’re not allowed to call him the bride, and he also gets Derek because Derek gets to drink tonight and _Scott_ is running this one,” Boyd mutters back, while deliberately opening up a noisy game on his phone to keep Scott from overhearing.

Scott’s probably too distracted by trying to look like he is genuinely enthusiastic about being in charge of celebrating Peter Hale’s last few days as a legally—though that’s basically meaningless—unattached man. Chris Argent, on the other hand—speaking of people who probably should _not_ be here—is eyeing Boyd like he might be rethinking his past few years as a ‘good’ hunter, so Boyd elbows Isaac and puts his phone away and tries to listen to what Scott’s saying.

“…karaoke down the hall, and um, there’s the big-screen TV too, and they say it’s got a premium cable hook-up,” Scott’s going on, with an increasingly desperate look on his face. He’s smiling like somebody jammed electrodes into his cheeks and then flicked all the switches.

“Lydia vetted this, right?” Isaac says, sidling closer to Boyd, while a few feet off, Peter slowly slides from politely unimpressed to disgusted and then, very worryingly, to speculative. “She wouldn’t have just let Scott think of everything. She would’ve gotten Laura to look things over at least? Right?”

“Okay, I’m done with this,” Jackson suddenly announces, shouldering his way forward. “Scott, listen, I figured you’d have no idea what to do without Stiles making it up for you, and if I have to spend a whole night with his sociopath fiancé because the guy’s basically killed all his friends—”

Peter clears his throat, and when Jackson glances over his shoulder, just smiles.

Jackson winces and shuffles closer to Scott, but stays stubbornly loud and strident. “The point is, I took care of it. We’re getting vodka and whiskey in with the food, but McCall here did book a place with a good chef so try not to puke it up till we leave, all right?”

“Leave?” Scott stammers.

“Should we tell him it’s okay to let Jackson help you this one time?” Isaac hisses to Boyd. “Because if he starts talking about it’s okay, don’t worry, you didn’t have to go through all the trouble, I’m gonna have to tackle him. We’re gonna have to. You got his left, right?”

“Yep,” Boyd mutters back.

“Yeah. Leave,” Jackson says, making a show of snapping out his phone and consulting it. “We have an hour and a half here. Then we’re going downtown for a private VIP room at Circe. We are not doing karaoke, at any point. Also, unless it’s whatever security Lydia or Stiles has on us, nobody is taking photos or video. Nobody. You do it, I kill your phone. Everybody got that?”

“Oh, I think so,” Peter says, clearly amused. “Nice and simple, very impressive, Whittemore. Even mind-altering substances shouldn’t keep you from complying with that one.”

Jackson shuts his mouth and almost grabs at Scott’s arm, and then catches himself. He’s quivering a little bit, but he manages to keep that out of his sarcastic reply. “Yeah, well, not really what I care about, but you’re welcome. Now, what else—oh, right—”

“Designated driver,” Chris says, holding up his hand. Then he looks at Peter. “No matter what anybody says. You’re free to try and pass me a drink anyway, but just keep in mind it’ll probably end up back on you.”

“Okay…okay, well, um, that’s…I think those are the important points,” Scott says, still flustered. “Anyway, everybody, this is about having fun, and coming together as a pack to be happy that Stiles and Peter are getting married, and—and that’s what matters, okay? They’re gonna be really happy together.”

“If I pass out, you’ll carry me, and vice versa,” Isaac says to Boyd. “Deal?”

Boyd looks at him. Isaac’s bulked up since high school, but not that much.

“At least call me a car, would you,” Isaac says. “Come on. I bought your groceries last week.”

“I’ll make sure Erica doesn’t end up in your bedroom,” Boyd allows.

Isaac sighs. “Great. When is the booze coming in, again?”

* * *

“Bro,” Cora slurs, swaying up to Derek. “C’mon, stop—stop—doing that thing with your face. You’re ruining the vibe.”

Derek literally doesn’t know what happened. It’s been all of twenty minutes. They walked into the club, the hostess greeted them and showed them to their private room. A waiter opened up a bottle of champagne, but that was a cheesy act with a saber and then they left, and anyway, one bottle doesn’t go that far when it’s split between so many people. There wasn’t any other alcohol that he could see, but now Stiles and Laura are sprawled across the floor, scarfing pizza and…and rating evil masterminds they’ve fought on some kind of shirtless hotness versus moral wrongness scale, while Erica’s rounding third base with another waiter who…

“We got him a stripper,” Derek says flatly, as little bits of a G-string show behind Erica’s groping hands.

Cora turns, stumbles, bats Derek off when he rolls his eyes and hauls her back up, and looks. Then she stumbles back around, blinks at him, and shakes her head. “What? Nah, Stiles said if we did that, Peter would terrorize the poor guy. I think he’s for the party down the hall.”

Derek looks at Erica again, and then deeply regrets it and puts his hand up to try and scrub his eyeballs. “Well, what, she just grabbed him on his way over?”

“I guess?” Cora says. Then she smacks something into his arm. When he lifts that, she pushes it into his chest, and ‘it’ turns out to be a small bottle of whiskey. “Derek. Derek, seriously, were you not pregaming?”

“Pregaming,” Derek says.

Cora nods vigorously. “Come on, I know you just got off patrol, but even Allison had half a shot before we left Stiles’ place.”

Before he can catch himself, Derek looks across the room. Allison’s sitting cross-legged on the chair behind Laura and Stiles, and while she is throwing the occasional comment into their bizarre debate, she still looks pretty in control of herself. She has a flute of champagne, but it’s half-full, and when Stiles offers her a tiny bottle of something, she laughs and tells him she’s gonna pace herself.

“Good advice,” Derek says, looking back at Cora. “Why exactly are you so big on drinking right now, anyway?”

“Because…Peter is officially going to be Stiles’ problem, for ever and ever, and also, God, Derek, we actually lived long enough to be in a wedding,” Cora says. “And not as the stupid flower girl Laura would always make me be. You think I don’t remember, well, I do, and it was _stupid_.”

“Yeah, because Derek did a better job than you. He never got tripped up by the skirt,” Laura calls to them.

Cora tilts her head. “I…do not remember this. Why don’t I remember this? Was I born yet? Please tell me I was born, and you can do the claw thing and make me remember. That alpha bullshit is okay when it’s embarrassing Derek.”

Derek’s sisters are horrible, horrible people, and adding alcohol and wolfsbane to that just throws kerosene on the flames of their horribleness. But—Derek is sober and so in the middle of Cora’s babbling is a good point, and he can’t help seeing it, and that’s basically why he takes the bottle from her.

“Yeah, we’re still around,” he says, tipping the bottle into his mouth.

Laura and Cora and, damn him, Stiles, all cheer. Derek makes a face—not at the booze, the booze is good, and there is no way Cora picked it—and then pushes Cora away and retreats to the chair next to Allison.

“Do you want a glass?” Allison says, laughing a little. “It might help you keep track.”

“That is absolutely the opposite of the point of this evening,” Stiles says, twisting around to show them a scandalized face. “Allison! How dare you!”

Allison smiles indulgently at him, while picking up her flute. She raises it in a salute, and after a moment, Stiles caves and grabs the bottle he’s drinking from. He clinks it with her glass, then holds it out to Derek. Who shrugs and clicks it with his own bottle, because okay, fine, this is all going to end in disaster. But they’ve come a pretty long way first, and that does deserve a lot of drinking.

“Awesome, awesome,” Erica says, as she kicks the waiter-stripper out and then comes hurtling back over. She lands in Laura’s lap, which…Laura is supposed to be the sober person and Derek is not totally sure sober people grab those body parts and Derek thinks he could use one more swallow, just for those images. “So, since we’re all fully committed now, wanna break out the fireworks?”

“What?” Derek says, yanking down his bottle.

“Kidding, kidding,” Stiles says, slinging his arm around Erica. “We’re just gonna fire off some rockets in the parking lot. Much safer.”

Derek looks at them. Then he looks down at his hand, which Allison has grabbed and used to slosh some of his whiskey into her champagne.

“Sorry,” she says. “Just…I think maybe we better step it up.”

“Right,” Derek says, watching her fingers unwrap from his wrist. “Right.”

* * *

“Because that’s the idiot play,” Lydia says as the credits roll. She sits up to get the remote, but then she remembers autoplay should get the next episode loaded and she fluffs herself back into the couch. “If they really want to get Escobar off their backs, they should—oh, sorry.”

“’s okay,” Stiles’ father says, not moving as she shifts off his shoulder. He waits till she’s settled again, and then reaches around to offer her the whiskey bottle.

Three hours in and her phone is locked up in an ongoing avalanche of texts from Scott, but so far there’s only been four from the on-duty cops, all of them about when they’ll be getting the leftover booze from the parties, and a single text from Stiles, just saying thank-you. Lydia considers the bottle, and then shakes her head.

Stiles’ dad snorts and twists back to put that on the side-table, and then picks up his glass of whiskey. He tops off Lydia’s glass from that, then takes a long sip himself. “Doing all right over there?”

“I can drink hard liquor for purposes of innocent relaxation, same as you,” Lydia mutters.

“Wasn’t accusing, just asking,” Stiles’ father mutters back.

She looks at him. He looks back, demonstrating exactly where Stiles got that particular arched brow from, and then he snorts and cracks a wry smile.

“Just checking that we’re drinking from the right bottle,” he says. He reaches over as he talks, retrieving said bottle from the table and then propping it against his knee to look at the label. “Depending on the type of relaxation you’re going after, you might not want to start with something like this.”

“Are you giving me _cheap_ whiskey?” Lydia says. Then she takes another look at him and makes a face. She’s a little hungry, she thinks—that ice cream didn’t stretch too far. “Oh, no, I see now. Better to start cheap and work up, is that what you think?”

“I think,” he says, a little deliberately. “I think I should’ve earmarked a bigger bottle for this. If I’d known way back when Claudia’s uncle sent it how many damn serial killers would get in the way first…I mean, it’s a good whiskey. I just think it should be…bigger.”

Lydia snorts. The snort seems to go on and on, for some reason. Then she realizes that it’s turned into a giggle and…a part of her is mortified, but most of her just thinks they’re on their own and all the surveillance equipment is already occupied elsewhere, and giggling is oddly comfortable. She’s comfortable, and she just doesn’t feel like shifting that.

She curls up her legs onto the couch, moving her head as it bumps into his shoulder, and has another sip of the whiskey. The trickle down her throat blazes a warm, floating path that spreads out from her collarbone and down over her breasts—it itches a little, she notices, lifting her hand to scratch at her blouse’s collar line. “You know, I think so too,” she mutters.

He’s looking down at her, she can tell by how he’s shifting against and under her. She almost thinks she can feel his breath drifting over the top of her head, too. “Lydia,” he says. “Lydia, why aren’t you out there with them? I don’t want to pry, but…you’ve done a lot for Stiles over the years, and I just—I just want to make sure—I mean, he’s my son, so I know for me, but you—””

“Oh, God, I think we both got over our crushes a long, _long_ time ago,” Lydia says. That warm streak’s not quite as warm now, at least not compared to the flush of irritation that’s rising up her face. She glances into her glass, but even if she tossed it all back, that wouldn’t be enough; her tolerance has gone up quite a bit since high school, unfortunately. “Listen, you know, Stiles is having fun right now, trust me. He is, and he isn’t missing me, and I’m not missing out, because—because _that_ is why I am doing his wedding and why he’s letting me. Because we both know.”

“Okay,” his father says. His brow is furrowed, and his mouth is a little puckered, the way it gets when he’s incredibly confused, and a little worried about what will happen if he keeps poking, but has decided that he’s got a duty to do so anyway. “Okay. That’s good. But sorry to be slow, but I don’t—”

“Because that’s not us,” Lydia says. She thinks about it, and then twists herself over to look at him. Her glass-holding hand knocks into his chest and they both grimace, and then Lydia stretches her arm over him to put that safely on the side-table; he moves the bottle there, too. “Because that’s the whole thing about us. He’s the first guy…really, the first one who ever saw that the big parties and the schoolyard queen act I was pulling? They’re interesting, in their way. And obviously I am very, very good at them. But they’re…they’re things I did, I do, because sometimes that’s how you get things done in the world. But really—”

“But really, when you two have fun, it’s not at that,” he says, understanding dawning in his eyes.

Lydia smiles. “He does want the party,” she says after a second. “Personally, I think it’s more to get back at Peter for making him miss that gaming con, but…he threw me a party when Jackson finally admitted we weren’t ever going to work out. So he gets a party.”

“Jackson is an idiot.” There’s a lamp on the side-table, and its light is coming from behind him when Lydia looks up, making him look…not younger, she thinks. He looks fine—little silver near the crown, and around the temples, but with his kind of blond, that’ll barely show for years and years yet. Still a good jawline. But he’s always trying to get them to be more careful, worrying about them, and that’s what’s changed in his face, the lack of worry. “Sorry. I try not to play favorites with you kids, but God, he makes me want to—”

“Are you honestly still calling us kids?” Lydia says. She still has her arm over him, she suddenly notices. Holding onto the couch on his other side. She thinks about that, and then uses her hold to pull herself up, and closer, so she can feel the drag of her breasts against his shirt.

He breathes in a little bit, a little slow. He can fix his eyes on something the same way Stiles does, like there’s not only nothing else in the world, but also like it really is a matter of life or death if he doesn’t notice every single detail of what he’s looking like. It just…doesn’t quite have the same feel as when Stiles does it, not really that intense hunger for _knowledge_. 

“You telling me you don’t all still call me Stiles’ dad behind my back?” he says after a long moment.

“John,” Lydia says. She pushes herself up so that her head is higher than his. “John. I’m buzzed. I’m not drunk. If I wanted to, I could get up, walk out that door, and take over this town before you got your belt on.”

“Well, then it’s a good thing that’s hanging upstairs,” John says, right as his hands come up and cup her face.

Lydia’s no Puritan, obviously, but she’s never seen the point in older men. She has enough on her hands getting the ones in her generation to fall in line, and adding age into it would just be another hassle. And anyway, she’s always thought it made more sense to be the one in the teaching position, so she can make sure she gets it just the way she likes it.

But there’s something for experience, actually. For just not fussing around with figuring out how to do it, and just _doing it_ , and God, they’re already sliding down onto the couch cushions. He doesn’t fight about letting her stay on top, just pushes his hands up her blouse and unsnaps her bra as she sucks on his lower lip, and then he drops even lower down. Lets his head nudge into her drooping collar, nuzzles his way around the loosening bra cup and lips a nipple and suddenly his fingers are stretching under her panties and one broad fingertip zeroes in right _there_ , pushes right down on her clit and if older men are going to remember _that_ every time, well.

She can change her mind.

* * *

The bottle rockets are pretty tame, as things go. They go up in the air and then explode and leave bits of plastic shrapnel all over the place, but they don’t open a portal to a hell dimension, turn into viciously parasitic monsters that lay eggs inside of you, or turn you into a mindless puppet. So they’re okay, Derek guesses. They’re even kind of cool, once Stiles and Erica get the trajectories right and manage to send two of them slamming into each other. Derek and his family, including Peter, all have some issue with fires, but for some reason that doesn’t extend to Hollywood-style pyrotechnics, and Derek doesn’t really feel like that contradiction is something he really needs to understand about himself. He’s just fine with being able to actually enjoy the same things other people do.

Of course, then they decide to go back inside. And do, for some godawful reason, karaoke.

“Not just karaoke, Derek,” Stiles says, while frantically punching buttons on a controller that looks like the same one he uses to boobytrap the high school. “This, my big bad werewolf buddy—”

“Don’t call me that,” Derek says.

“—is a top of the line, retro bomb, all the neon bells and whistles your little secretly disco heart could want—”

“I hate disco,” Derek says.

“—integrated singin’ and dancin’ _machine_ ,” Stiles says, flourishing his last button-push. He shoves the controller aside and then leans past—on—mostly on Derek to get at the half-empty beer bottle he’d left on the table behind Derek. He smells like three other kinds of alcohol and truffled potato chips. “Hell, there’s even the optional controllers over there if you want to get your guitar god on.”

Derek looks at him. “I’m not doing this,” he says. “If you make me, I’ll—”

“Oh! Oh! They have _Savage Garden_!” Allison says, patting at the monitor screen with equal parts awe and glee. “We have to, guys, the cherry cola song, we gotta. My parents _had_ this CD.”

“Really?” Erica says. “Savage Garden? No offense, Ally, just…just…your dad, like, I always figured he was more…more country. Like, that old-school stuff, with the banjos and the you’re gonna go _straight_ to hell, sweet child whatever.”

Derek tenses up and shoots Laura a glance, because even now, when they’re friendly enough that Chris Argent actually gets irritated enough to lecture them on proper alibis, it can get sensitive. Laura is actually sticking to her sober designation and she shifts over to get Erica in her line of sight, but then Allison giggles and…sort of…sort of sits down. Allison’s kind of sliding onto her ass against the wall where the monitor is mounted.

“Yeah, I know, right? But Scott and I were helping Dad fix his computer, and we found one of those slideshows, like the reception, right? And their song was ‘Truly Madly Deeply,’ really,” Allison says. She shovels her hair away from her face, then hikes her elbow up against the wall to support herself. But that slides and she ends up just grabbing at a bemused Erica. “For the record, I am—am _ninety-nine_ percent sure, Gerard? Did not pick that one.”

“Well, okay, cherry cola chick, let’s get our nineties on,” Erica grins, helping Allison back to her feet.

Erica’s hands go more on Allison’s hips than her waist, and Allison is even drunker than she’s moving, from the way the alcohol is bleeding into her scent. And Derek knows better than to take his eyes off Erica when she’s sober, so he goes over to just…shift Erica to the microphone, get something into her hands that isn’t married. Which is how he ends up doing five songs, including that stupid ‘Werewolves of London’ song.

They surrounded him. He’s not allowed to beat any of them up outside of sparring time, and even in sparring, whenever Stiles gets the least little scratch—which sometimes actually _teaches_ the guy to look up from his mad magicking once in a while—Peter subjects the rest of them to weeks of mindgames like oops, forgot I used the last of the toilet paper and sorry I had to borrow your car for my dead body. And Lydia _promised_ none of this gets to be used as blackmail later.

Derek does not fucking howl when the fucking singer does the wolf-howl. He has some dignity, somewhere around here.

“Oh, ugh,” Allison mutters as Erica windmills a power chord in front of them, she and Stiles both screaming along to some grunge song. “Crap. Oh…um, sorry, I gotta—I think—”

“You gonna be sick?” Cora says, looking up from where she’s trying to reset the karaoke machine.

“Bathroom’s this way,” Derek says, already helping Allison over by the arm. He thinks he sees his sister smirk at him and flashes his fangs.

Allison slip-trips over Stiles’ leg, falling into Derek’s side. The burp she lets out at the same time smells distinctly of sour bile, so Derek drops the intimidation and just hurries her out of the room and down the hall to the ladies’ room.

It’s a small bathroom—not a single, but it’s so tiny that Allison can touch the door of one stall without stepping over the threshold. She’s still coordinated enough to close the door behind her, so Derek figures he’ll just stay in the hall till she’s done.

“Hey,” Stiles says, wandering up to him. “She okay?”

“I’m fine!” Allison shouts through the door. “Just don’t call Dad!”

“Would never!” Stiles calls back, but then he plops his shoulder against the wall and slouches there, looking at Derek like he’s going to keep Derek company. “So.”

“What,” Derek says. “We’ll be back in a second.”

“But we still gotta sing me and Peter’s song,” Stiles says. “We can’t do that without you, Derek, you know that.”

Derek resists the urge to make himself throw up on Stiles’ shoes. He is older and more mature than that, and also, gross and disgusting fluids have never kept Stiles away. “You two don’t have a song. You just have whatever song is going to make me sing about his touch and no. No.”

“Oh, come on, like you aren’t secretly proud of your falsetto,” Stiles says, rolling his eyes. “And the whole vague incest vibes, whatever, we’re all pack here anyway, right?”

“You are so messed up,” Derek says, and then he hears Allison retch and he jerks around. He puts his hand on the door knob, but she makes a spitting noise and then curses to herself about reliving bad college parties and she sounds irritated, so she’s probably okay. Probably. Anyway…

Anyway, Stiles is still standing there, eyeing him. “Look, I think we gotta talk about this,” Stiles says, his voice going lower and more pointed. “I was gonna, maybe, leave it for after my honeymoon, because man, but dealing with your family’s issues are just this endless rabbit hole with constant offshoots into mayhem, but—”

“If you didn’t want that, should you really be marrying my uncle?” Derek snorts, looking back at him.

Stiles takes a step closer and jabs his finger into Derek’s shoulder. “Want to object?” he says.

Derek starts to answer, then cuts himself off as he looks at the man. All the hair’s smushed over on one side of Stiles’ head, with somebody’s finger-shapes still molded into it, and Stiles’ usual outfit of t-shirt under flannel’s been stripped back to the t-shirt, which has had its collar stretched out so he’s showing a—to a werewolf—provocative expanse of creamy neck and shoulder. And he’s got that goddamn look in his eyes, all wise madness, like he knows and like he knows Derek is on the edge of not caring.

“If this is some thing of Peter’s,” Derek finally says.

Stiles’ brow twitches irritably. “And you say I’m fucked up, when that’s your go-to all the time, any time.”

“Yeah, well, you’re fucking the guy,” Derek mutters. In the bathroom, Allison’s still spitting every now and then, and in between she’s taking long, heavy breaths, sounding like she maybe wants to just put her head down and sleep through this. He kind of wishes that too, he thinks, and then he jerks forward, pressing his and Stiles’ bellies together and then just touching their foreheads. “You _want_ somebody to object, Stiles, I think you’re a little late.”

“You’re still such an asshole, no matter what we do,” Stiles sighs. He hasn’t backed off any, and in fact, just keeps giving Derek that look. “Why do I try.”

“Don’t know, why do you?” Derek growls.

He straightens up without moving back. The slide of his forehead up against Stiles’ makes Stiles’ head rock in the same direction, squeezing the space out from between their faces, and then he feels Stiles’ hands on either side of his jaw. And he lets them tip his head.

It’s a good, nasty kiss, teeth coming in between the flesh to keep it from turning soft. Stiles pulls hard enough on Derek’s head that Derek stumbles against the wall, getting dragged away from the bathroom door, and then shoves a leg forward to knock Derek’s knee and slide briefly against Derek’s groin, just long enough to get Derek tensed up in anticipation. And put him off enough for Stiles to twist them and pin Derek’s back against the wall.

“Derek, you are frustrated,” Stiles says, pulling back. He’s off, Derek thinks, and then Derek sniffs again and curses because he _knows_ Stiles knows how to manipulate scent, he knows that and he still missed how Stiles somehow squeezed in a vodka bath because all that liquor Derek has been smelling? Hasn’t been going into Stiles’ breath. “You are so frustrated, in fact, that you’re gonna do me, Peter’s fiancé, and one he’s not hitching up because it’s part of some _ridiculous_ plan to get my dad out of a ja—”

“That was so stupid,” Derek mumbles absently.

Stiles pauses to share a nod. “Yup, totally, sometimes I really wonder whether he learns all his blackmail methods from mov—off the point. Which is, I try with you, Derek, because Scott is my absolute, end of the world, never gonna not be my _bestie_ , and Allison’s grown a lot on me too, and—”

Derek snarls. To which Stiles just rolls his eyes, but panic already has Derek stiff-arming Stiles off him and then glancing at the bathroom door. “Shut up, shut up, I’m not—”

“You’re not gonna fuck up their marriage, whatever, you are literally standing by and letting it happen because you are not seeing the forest for the Scott-and-Allison camping trips!” Stiles snaps, grabbing Derek’s shirt and pushing him back against the wall. “You know what else, Derek? I’d fuck you. I’d do it, and don’t act like you wouldn’t do it too, we have mad UST and if you had even a shred of strategic competency to go with your anger issues, I’d be having some serious talks with Peter about his stance on family _relations_. But it’s not gonna, because you are just completely _shit_ at pining for somebody.”

“So what?” Derek hisses, still glancing at the door. He can hear a sink running, he thinks Allison might be coming out any second. “So I’m supposed to tell them hey, I think I’m in love with you?”

Stiles looks at him. Then Stiles—Derek flinches, but Stiles isn’t trying to kiss him. Stiles is…dropping his head to bang it, slowly, against Derek’s chest.

“Derek.” Stiles’ hands suddenly unwrap from Derek’s shirt and go up to squeeze Derek’s cheeks, not pleasantly. He’s still banging his head against Derek. “I’m gonna handhold, just this one time, because I am getting married and I love the man I’m marrying and so help me, I do not want to come back from my honeymoon to a war zone and a burned-out Lyds. So what you’re gonna do is, you’re gonna not screw me. You’re gonna take Allison and get her some water, and you’re gonna check that Peter hasn’t messed Scott up too bad, and then you’re gonna ask them are they okay? Okay? Okay.”

Then Stiles lets go of Derek’s face and turns away and walks back into his party. Derek eases off the wall and wipes off his mouth, and then he hears the door and pivots to find Allison unsteadily walking out of the bathroom.

“I think the gin? The gin’s not working for me,” Allison mutters, her hand alternating between touching her forehead and rubbing at her breastbone. She takes another step towards Derek, squints, and then offers him a concerned smile. “You don’t look so great either.”

“Water break,” Derek says after a second.

“Good idea,” Allison says, reaching out. 

She stumbles a little before she gets his arm, and then he walks her down to the storeroom at the other end of the hall, where they break into a plastic-wrapped pallet. Then Derek sits on the pallet with his bottle, because he can hear the karaoke machine and he is not going back in there—for a lot of reasons, but especially not when they’re doing Beyoncé. Allison leans against the wall, swigging from her bottle, and then shrugs and piles onto the pallet next to Derek. Her head ends up on his shoulder.

“I think that’s Scott,” Allison says, her tone tired. She fumbles out her phone, then holds it out to Derek. “Sorry, just, I gotta…can you? He’s gonna hear me sounding…and I don’t want to ruin his fun.”

Derek takes her phone and answers the call. “Something go wrong?”

 _“Oh, Derek?”_ Scott says. There are shouts and thumping music in the background, and Derek can hear a muffled Jackson demanding that they provide more foam.

“Yeah, Allison’s busy singing,” Derek says. “Karaoke.”

Scott makes an odd noise, almost angry, and then he sighs. He’s in a different room from whatever’s going on, from the sound of it. _“Right. Okay. Well, I was just…I was calling because it’s past midnight and she wasn’t sure she was going to stay the whole time, and…and I guess she is?”_

Derek looks at Allison. Then he frowns and cranes his head around hers, trying to see into her face. Her breathing and heartbeat are both on the slow side—healthy, but…yeah, she’s dozed off. “It’s going pretty strong here,” Derek finally says. “I’ll ask when she’s done, but Stiles was talking about a DDR tournament, last I heard, and…things okay there? Peter still out of jail?”

 _“Yeah, it’s okay, I think everybody’s having fun,”_ Scott says, with that weird tone in his voice again. If Derek didn’t know Scott so well, he’d call it resentful. _“Peter actually thanked Jackson.”_

“When do you think the possession happened?” Derek says, getting out his own phone and starting a text to Stiles and Lydia.

 _“No, no, no, he’s okay! Really,”_ Scott says, his voice rising. Then he sighs and thumps around, and ends with a thud like he just threw himself into a chair. _“I’m actually kind of glad for Jackson. He did a good job.”_

Derek considers that. “With the party you were running?”

 _“I think that was just so Stiles and Lydia could make sure it didn’t get out of hand,”_ Scott says, with a completely offense-free wistfulness that’s painful to hear. _“Well, that, and I’m pretty sure Jackson wouldn’t have done as good of a job if we’d just asked him.”_

Much as Derek hates it, Scott’s right. Jackson’s never really outgrown his obsession with showing Scott up, even though Scott has literally never cared about that. Scott would gladly give Jackson a couple wins if Jackson asked, which just sends that moron up the wall. “Okay. I guess Peter thanking him probably will keep him paranoid enough without me threatening him.”

 _“Don’t threaten him,”_ Scott says, but he’s absent about it, like how anybody else would remind people to grab their lunch on the way out. _“So…you’re having fun there?”_

“I’m hiding in a storeroom so I don’t have to sing again,” Derek says.

Scott laughs sympathetically, and then shifts around himself. _“She’s having fun, right?”_

“Yeah,” Derek says. He glances at Allison, and then shifts his arm when he notices she’s got her wrist crooked to accommodate it. She doesn’t wake up, but her arm slides to a more natural position. “You could probably sneak out and come over at this point. Chris is still sober, right?”

 _“No, no, that’s okay. I should stay, I don’t think we’re going to go that much longer,”_ Scott sighs. _“And anyway, the girls wanted to have some time together and I don’t want to get into that—”_

“I’m here,” Derek points out.

Scott is politely silent. It’s how his breathing twitches a little bit. _“So…how are you holding up?”_

“Storeroom,” Derek says.

 _“Oh, right,”_ Scott says apologetically. He takes another breath and Derek figures he’ll ask whether Derek needs help getting out, and Derek is going to have to make himself lie and say no, because he promised Laura he’d stay because she is _that_ annoyed about being the sober person. _“I’m just not any good at this, am I?”_

“Parties?” Derek says, blinking. “Well, why do you need to be? Honestly, I think this is all less for Stiles or Peter so much as for us, right? Stiles has some weird idea about how this works as pack bonding, and you know how he is with ideas. I bet he’d rather be camping. If I had to pick, I’d go with camping.”

Scott starts laughing halfway through that, which is probably why Derek goes on as long as he does. He just really isn’t kidding, he means it, and he wants Scott to hear that and to stop thinking like he’s some pathetic nobody in high school again. And he probably gets a little too sharp about it, because Scott stops laughing.

But before he can apologize, Scott makes a noise that’s the verbal equivalent of a headshake. _“It’d be really nice if camping solved everything,”_ Scott says.

“It helped me,” Derek says. He pauses, trying to get himself under control—he did not have that many drinks, but right, _Stiles_ and his wacko sense of humor. And how annoyingly hot that kiss was, even if Derek’s already wondering how to disinfect his mouth. “It really did, you know. I know I was—I was angry with you the first few trips, but…I wasn’t ever going to talk about some of that stuff just sitting here, or running around stopping murderers, or whatever we end up doing.”

 _“I’m happy to hear that,”_ Scott says simply. He’s silent for a few seconds, and then he sighs again. _“I wish Allison and I had something that worked like that. I just…it’s just so weird. We barely talk to each other anymore, and it’s not because we’re mad at each other, as far as I can tell. It’s just…we don’t have anything to talk about, and I don’t know why. Actually, I think the last time we really had a good talk, it was when we were—don’t take this the wrong way, but when we were trying to figure out how to get you to talk about Braeden.”_

Derek snorts, and then realizes Scott might take that the wrong way. “Not offended. So…maybe you guys should just take a trip by yourselves. I don’t plan to be dumped by anybody any time soon, so I think I’ll be fine.”

 _“No, that’s—”_ Scott starts.

Somebody bangs against the storeroom door, making Derek start because he hadn’t noticed the footsteps leading up to it. Then there’s a giggle, and the purr of a werewolf thinking about sex. “Hey! Derek!” shouts Cora. “Get back here! We promise no more karaoke, all right? But it’s sudden-death Mortal Kombat—”

“You _know_ you gotta get your Scorpion on,” calls Erica.

Scott says something in Derek’s ear, but then hangs up before Derek can really pay attention to it. Then Allison lifts her head. “Sonya?” she says in a sleepy voice. “Can I get dibs?”

“But I love Son—” Cora says.

She’s cut off by wet noises. Derek thinks briefly that he thought Erica was going after Laura, and then thinks that he doesn’t want to know the truth about either of his sisters, and just makes a lot of noise as he and Allison get up off the pallet.

“Thanks,” Allison says, leaning on his shoulder. “You know, Scott’s right. It’s weird, but for some reason we talk way more to you than to each other, these days.”

“I think you’re just really busy,” Derek says after a long moment. “You just need to get past the wedding, and then it’ll get quieter.”

He gets the door open, and looks at the ceiling and not at his sister and Erica right outside. Beside him, Allison makes a thoughtful humming noise. She rests her chin on his shoulder, one hand reaching up to pat his back, and then…she sloshes what’s left of her water on Erica.

After that, they’re a little busy running back to the room, so Derek just forgets about it.

Well, he stays on the other side of the room from Stiles, but other than that. He forgets about it. They’ll be okay, anyway.

* * *

It’s past three in the morning and Chris is taking off the shoes and belt of an unconscious, drunk young man.

Isaac groans and flops onto his back, and Chris sighs and goes around to the top of the bed, then flips the man onto his side again, so if he has to throw up, he won’t choke on it. Then Chris checks that there’s water and werewolf-grade painkillers on the bedside table, leaves the shoes and the belt on a chair, and goes into the hall and wonders why on earth he’s still doing this at his age.

“Ah, there you are,” Peter says, coming up the stairs. He has two tumblers and a bottle of whiskey in hand, and he doesn’t look as if he’s going to be easily distracted. “Now, don’t tell me where you keep your taser and gun, I do remember that much from that night—”

“If you’re stupid enough to cheat on him, why don’t you just shoot yourself in the head and save us all a few weeks of misery?” Chris says.

Peter pauses at the top of the stairs. Then he shifts one glass so he’s squeezing it between his arm and his chest, leaving him free to uncap and pour the bottle into the other glass. “Actually, Chris, I told Stiles about our night years ago.”

Chris stares at him. The man has the temerity to look up with a placid smile and hold out the glass of whiskey as if he’s being charitable to Chris.

“Do you honestly think I don’t appreciate what I have?” Peter says, still with that damned smile on his face. “I realize I’ve shown some very poor judgment in the past, but as I recall, it had to do with mis-priorizations, not with not understanding the value of someone who literally shut the gates of Hell for me. Not to mention who will shanghai his friends into being my friends for a night, simply because he doesn’t think it’s fair that mine weren’t interested in waiting on a crispy vegetable.”

“Well, from the way you act, I don’t think it’s my fault for missing that,” Chris mutters. He debates another second, then gives in and takes the glass from Peter.

Who promptly pours himself a shot, as if they’re just going to sit down and talk this out. Scott is not among the passed out, but after he’d finished helping to carry everybody in, he’d excused himself to make a call, hopefully to Chris’ daughter. The fact that he hasn’t yet come back is probably the best sign Chris has seen all month, so Chris…decides he’ll grit his teeth and wait this one out instead of interrupting them.

“So, no questions?” Peter says after a long, awkward silence. “Not even a little curious about his reaction?”

“He agreed to marry you anyway,” Chris mutters into his whiskey. “I’m not sure what else I need to know.”

Peter regards him silently. Chris drinks the whiskey and debates the merits of pretending he’s gotten a text from Lydia versus just walking out. Then Peter turns his head to the side and smiles and something about that smile, about how patronizing it is, just gets to Chris.

He takes two steps forward and swings right up to Peter, who’s got two choices: drop down onto the first step or twist sideways, putting his back to the wall. And takes neither of them, so they end up face to face, staring at each other. Chris wasn’t trying to do this, but his hand ends up bumping into Peter’s thigh, they’re so close, his knuckles jutting out because his fingers are still curled around his glass, brushing up against Peter’s inseam.

“So what were you going to say?” Chris says. “What, that you’re asking for him? That this is some cocked-up idea of yours to get back at me and my family, for the umpteenth time, while making him think you’re doing it for his benefit? If that’s the case, _Peter_ , don’t you think the last ten or so times that blew up in your face should tell you something?”

A little ripple goes through Peter’s smooth act, just a faint hint of glow in his eyes, a sliver more tooth in his smile. Sure, he can be unusually patient for a werewolf, but he’s still a werewolf and aggression comes with the territory.

“Well, _Chris_ ,” he says. Breathes, really, shifting so close that Chris feels the waft off the flick of his tongue behind his teeth; Chris twitches at it, not backwards but it’s enough of a motion for Peter to grin like Chris just handed him the last wolfsbane bullet. “If that was the case, don’t you think I’d be telling you all about how Stiles can’t stop thinking about you? He just admires that tenacity of yours, that determination to do right no matter what a hundred years of history says, that _humble_ air of yours. It’s just so compelling, you know, compared to a beta werewolf who couldn’t even rally his own family to him.”

“You’re a real shit, you know,” Chris says after a long second. Suddenly he’s tired, and feeling like more a fool than he usually does, taking the bait when he knows better just because these days he’s sitting around in an empty house, watching the rest of the pack run around and thinking his family chronicles never mentioned how _lonely_ surviving is.

“Actually, I think I’m being rather merciful for once,” Peter says. Now he twists sideways, and Chris is moving as the same time to let him slide out from between Chris and the wall. “I’m not filling your head with romantic nonsense even though I know very well how not beating that out of you was your father’s biggest mistake.”

Chris lifts his hand, remembers he’s holding a glass, and then remembers he doesn’t have to take this bullshit from Peter. He can leave. “Go to hell, Peter. The kids are safe so I’m out.”

“He wanted to hear the details,” Peter suddenly says. “Not you, Chris, _us_.” 

What Chris needs to do is just keep walking, and kick out a window if he has to. He’s not so old he can’t figure out how to get down from the second story.

“He likes you,” Peter adds, and there’s enough genuine frustration in his voice to make him sound honest, not mocking. “He likes you a good deal. And he certainly understands why I, even assisted by alcohol, would ever bother to stoop—”

“You’re not really making much of a case here,” Chris can’t help saying, as he looks over his shoulder.

“I really shouldn’t have to.” Peter presses his lips together, then, to Chris’ surprise, abruptly downs his shot of whiskey. Then he sighs and shakes his head and looks almost wistful in his disbelief. “He’s marrying me, as you’ve pointed out. And he knows who he’s marrying, I don’t think even you could say otherwise. But he likes you, and it’s a persistent thing, this like, and so…I could be much more, shall we say, bloody about this, and we both know that.”

Chris turns around, but takes a step back at the same time. It’s not a retreat so much as a precaution, getting enough space in between them that he’d be at too much of a disadvantage to lunge. “And you really think this is the less risky option?”

“I think,” Peter says, with a deliberation that gives away how brittle his confidence is. “That I do find you attractive as well, and I at least have a good idea of how fair you’ll play. Stiles, of course, is his own person, but…I know who I’m marrying, too.”

“And if I’m coming in through your invitation, that’s always going to color it,” Chris suddenly realizes.

Peter stiffens slightly, but the contempt in his face is more prominent. “You wouldn’t have the nerve otherwise, don’t pretend not,” he says. “Think it over, Chris. It’s still a while before we leave on our honeymoon. Plenty of time to rearrange the travel plans.”

His voice shifts higher, airier, and then he even waves his hand as he turns and goes back down the stairs. For a few minutes Chris stands there and looks at the space where Peter had been. He raises his glass once, before remembering he’s already finished the whiskey, and then he puts his arm down and stares a little longer.

Eventually Chris ducks into the bathroom. Gives himself a few splashes of water to the face, then braces both hands against the counter and looks at himself in the mirror. He closes his eyes, then opens them. Then jerks around as somebody knocks about in the hallway just outside.

“Hey,” Scott says sheepishly, a lightly-wheezing Erica slung over his shoulder. “Sorry. Her shoes just…”

Chris looks down, then picks them up. “What’s she doing here?” he says. “Did Stiles’ group come over?”

“Oh, no, Allison says they’re still hanging out,” Scott says. He shifts Erica’s arm to lie over his shoulder, too, and her wheezes turn into full-on snores. “I don’t know how Erica got here. I just went into the garage to take the trash out and she was sleeping on the hood of your car.”

“My car?” Chris says.

“It’s okay, she didn’t maul it or anything, I checked,” Scott says. “I told Allison about her, but Allison says that’s okay, Erica texted them she’d catch up when they got to the laser tag.”

“Laser tag,” Chris says. “Wait, when are they stopping? It’s past three.”

“Allison says Stiles invented a way to cut Pixy Stix with wolfsbane,” Scott says.

They look at each other, and then Chris silently moves out of the way so Scott can take Erica into one of the bedrooms. Then Chris takes out his phone and texts Lydia. He gives her five minutes, and when she doesn’t reply, he texts John.

Scott comes back out at that point and Chris tips the phone so Scott can read the screen. “Okay,” Scott says, as minute three passes with no sign of a reply. “Well, I can go over and check, but my car’s still at…no, never mind, it’s really late and you’re probably tired—”

“It’s my daughter, Scott,” Chris says, taking out his car keys. “Allison, and sugar-happy werewolves with laser rifles. I don’t care if you’re an alpha, you’re gonna need the SUV to even get _close_.”

Scott sighs and nods. “Okay, you’re probably right. Let’s go.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For a mirror-universe idea of what a disco-loving Derek might look like, you should watch _Everybody Wants Some!!_.


	5. Chapter 5

“Erica wasn’t in my bed when I woke up,” Isaac mutters, a pleased note fighting its way through his pained groan. He reaches over and fist-bumps Boyd, then puts his head back in his cereal.

Jackson finally gives up on trying to open the pill bottle the proper way and just cuts off the entire top third of the bottle with his claws. Which sends painkillers everywhere, and ends with him on his ass on the floor because he didn’t get out of the way when Cora literally divebombed off the chair for a handful of pills.

“I think I might have agreed to go out with that guy with the laser bazooka,” Laura mumbles. “Did we ever agree on whether he’s supernatural or not?”

“He did a double backflip off the tower,” Cora says, climbing back onto her seat. “I vote rogue hunter.”

“He’s a she, and she’s not a hunter, she’s a kitsuné, and you’re supposed to pick her up at eight on Tuesday and bring Erica,” Derek says. As they all look at him, he scowls down at the toaster, which meekly pops up two golden-brown bagel halves. He takes them out and shoves in another two halves, and then goes back to glowering it into not burning them. “Also, I hate you all, and I am _never_ doing this again.”

“Ugh, crap, we failed,” Erica says, finally prying her head off the kitchen island. The hangover cure’s kicked in, but while that stuff fixes the headache, it doesn’t do anything for the dehydration and she feels like her whole body’s shriveled into a raisin. “We didn’t get Derek drunk enough, guys, Stiles is going to be so—”

“Good morning,” Peter says, swanning into the room. He’s apparently just showered, and did a pretty shitty job of drying off because the towel around his waist is sticking deep into his butt-crack and hugging the rest of his ass like it completely understands what Erica wants in the morning. “Stiles is fine, and…ah, thank you, Derek. We’ll be eating upstairs.”

He takes a couple of the toasted bagel halves and a tub of cream cheese, and walks back out of the room.

“Doesn’t he need a knife or a spoon?” Scott says, coming in from the other direction.

“No,” everybody says.

Scott blinks. Allison comes in right behind him, smiles and pecks him on the cheek, and then pulls him over to Derek, who already has two bagel halves up for them and is opening another tub of cream cheese.

“On second thought,” Erica says, staring at them.

Derek shoots her a look, which Erica ignores. Allison’s turning towards her too, which Erica normally wouldn’t ignore, but just then Erica’s phone goes off with the ringtone of doom. Erica’s only ever consciously ignored Lydia twice in her life, and she still isn’t quite sure how she lived to regret it, so she groans and grabs a pill that Cora tosses to her, and then dry-swallows it as she answers the phone.

“Yup?” Erica says. “Oh, yeah, yeah, got it. Back on, I hear you.”

* * *

Lydia wakes up somewhere in the early hours of the morning. It’s cool and quiet, and the body she’s curled against feels almost like an extension of herself, she’s so relaxed. Her arm just sleeks into the broad back, her breast rests up against the subtle ripple of a rib-cage, with that soft body warmth where everything blends together.

She gets up. Gently, not stirring him, and then she uses the shower down the hall rather than the one in the master bath. Clothes aren’t a problem; all the pack members have at least one change stashed in each person’s place. Her hair is trickier, since her purse has hair-spray but no straightening irons or even roller brushes, so she ends up just doing it into a loose bun. She’s a little light on make-up as well, but decides that a minimalist look probably will work just fine, considering it’s a clean-up day.

When John comes into the kitchen, Lydia’s sitting at her laptop with her tablet propped up beside her, simultaneously finalizing the DJ’s contract while going over the previous night’s reports. Her phone didn’t shrill at any point with the true emergency alarm, but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t have urgent problems waiting for her.

He pauses in the doorway and Lydia hits ‘save,’ then lifts her fingers from the keyboard. But then John just comes the rest of the way into the kitchen. When she finally looks over, he’s got his head in the fridge, pulling out eggs, so she goes back to the police notes.

John makes pancakes. He sets a plate by her, and then puts another down, a healthy couple feet from hers, and eats mostly standing up as he goes through his phone and curses under his breath. His pancakes are very good, but they’re nothing unusual; they’re his go-to breakfast food for entertaining pack members and the odd deputy.

“Stiles says Cora might have picked a fight with an omega,” Lydia finally has to say. “Laura talked it down and the omega left in a Honda Civic, but I think we should check whether the omega really left town. Or if they actually are an omega. I don’t know that I trust Laura’s call, given the time-stamp.”

“What’s the plate number?” John says.

Lydia reels it off and John texts that to a deputy, and then lets her know that Parrish and Deaton picked up some odd fluctuations in the telluric currents. Not totally out of line with past measurements, but this close to a big event like the wedding, they’re going to need to check it out anyway. She and John talk over the best way to do that, given that most of the pack is nursing hangovers, and then John washes up his plate, saying he’d better get back into uniform.

It’s about time Lydia went to check on just how disabled the pack is, too. But when she gets up, John sucks in his breath and Lydia goes still, and realizes just how much she’d relaxed from when John had first walked into the kitchen.

“You want anything?” John says. He looks at her, then moves his hand.

She starts a little, seeing the apple he’s holding out towards her. He’s standing over the fruit bowl and his other hand is breaking off a banana, probably for his lunch.

Lydia looks up at him and he looks back, calm and steady and unreadable in the way that means _anything_ could be read into it, and irrationally, Lydia wishes he wasn’t making this so simple.

“I have wedding cake to finalize in an hour,” she says. She feels like she’s apologizing, for some reason. “They will get that frosting right, so help me.”

“All right,” John says, stepping out of the room. He takes the apple and the banana with him.

She sits at her laptop for exactly two more seconds. Then her inbox starts pinging again with emails, and honestly, Lydia just doesn’t have the time to sort out anything that isn’t threatening to upset the balance of power in town.


	6. Chapter 6

“I think we’re doing this wrong,” Stiles says.

Peter, the bastard, just hums at him, lolling on the floor with sex-mussed hair curling into the curlicues printed on the carpet, half-lidded eyes and a lazily inviting look of satiation on his face, all, oh, really, but that felt _so_ good, for me at least and wasn’t it good for you and don’t you think you should just come back here? Just for a second.

“I see your second-round face and I am trying to have a serious discussion here.” Stiles shrugs off Peter’s legs, and then, when they start to fold up around him, he grabs under the thighs and hauls them forward and up. And cants himself forward as well, as much so he won’t slide out of Peter’s ass as so he gets a good view of that second when Peter seizes up a little and goes all unfocused and really, truly has nothing on his mind except for what Stiles is doing to him.

Which is why Stiles then reaches down and pinches both of Peter’s nipples. Peter hisses and jerks, and then freezes. Then carefully puts his hands back on the floor, and away from where they’d been about to grab Stiles’ shoulders.

“I know, and I don’t mean to distract you,” Peter says. He twitches as Stiles pinches him again, then clenches up around Stiles’ cock when Stiles lets his thumbs roll over those sore nipples. “Well, all right, I was, but because I just don’t see how _we’re_ doing it wrong. Stiles, you can cajole and argue and even threaten, but at the end of the day, you can’t be responsible for other people’s actions. Not unless you’re willing to get into mind-control—”

“And I did not bring the sex toys with me, so we are not rehashing that discussion right now,” Stiles says. Then he grins and gives Peter’s right nipple a friendly pat. “Yeah, I know you like the wax play too, but I’d like to get _some_ of our deposit on this place back.”

Peter snorts because he’s trying to pretend he’s not pouting. “Then it’s not your fault that my nephew has the emotional perception of an overripe fruit.”

Somebody calls their names. They’re getting closer, and also, when Stiles pays attention to it, the buzzing on his phone for incoming texts is getting closer together. “Overripe fruit?” he says, gripping Peter’s knees.

“Derek _does_ have soft spots, they just tend to— _ah_ —” Peter squirms as Stiles pulls out of him, then flops back, panting a little “—end up in bruising and inconveniently-timed splitting, and a complete waste of good juice.”

“Peter, I love you, but sometimes your metaphors make me uncomfortable,” Stiles says, dropping back himself. At first he’s resting back on his hands, and then he spots his shirt. He hooks it over and pulls it on, and then that’s it for the moment, so he slumps onto his back.

Something touches his knee. He rolls his eyes and moves it away, so Peter shifts over to his other leg, rubbing one cheek up the inside thigh before nosing speculatively at Stiles’ balls and cock. Stiles lets Peter lick a little bit, then bats at the man’s head. Just gets hair, but Peter gets the point and keeps moving up till he’s lying with his head on Stiles’ stomach, his arms loosely encircling Stiles’ waist.

“He’s not that bad a kisser,” Stiles says, just as he slides his hand around the back of Peter’s neck. He squeezes lightly, till he feels that whisper of tension come and go, and then loosens up so his fingers naturally slide in behind Peter’s ears. “But man, talk about pride cometh before a horrible life decision. I don’t need any more of that, thank you.”

“Most people,” Peter says, starting off lofty. “Would say they don’t need any at all.”

He lifts his head—he’s careful not to knock off Stiles’ hand—and looks up, all sarcastic challenge till Stiles curls his hand around, fingers a few sweaty strands at his temple, and then he softens. Most people, if they’re going to talk about that, when they soften, they get goofy; Peter doesn’t do that. He gets _affectionate_ , but he’s not silly about it, not like he isn’t paying any attention to what he’s doing. That’s the thing, he _is_ paying attention, and he knows exactly how unexpected it is for him, affection, and so that’s why he always looks like he can’t quite believe his luck.

“Congrats, you got the weirdo kid who kind of digs smarmy psycho masochists,” Stiles says. He grins as Peter crawls further up over him, one hand moving to cup the side of his face.

Peter actually doesn’t have a pathological need to be quippy. At least, when he’s not playing to an audience, and right now it’s just him and Stiles. He just smiles back, not smug, just happy, and then he bends down and kisses Stiles nice and slow. Stiles runs his hand back to Peter’s nape, rubbing it as the kiss heats up, and then starts to drag his fingers through Peter’s hair, tugging just hard enough to break Peter’s moan before he releases it. Then puts his fingers back in and massages them against Peter’s scalp, and—

“Stiles, Danny fixed the ring-robot five minutes ago and Lydia’s starting to get upset,” Allison calls through the door.

Peter actually breaks the kiss off first, though Stiles already had his hands down to push off the floor. He waits a second for Peter to roll off him, then sits up.

“So you didn’t scar Chris or anything, did you?” Stiles says. “I mean, he’s not avoiding pack stuff anymore, but he’s still doing that lurking thing, and lurking Argents are not a good sign.”

“I—” Peter starts, pulling on his shirt.

“ _What_ ,” Lydia snarls, almost ripping the doors off as she storms in and waves her phone in Peter’s face. “What. _What is this_.”

“Hey, hold on, let’s just chill for a second,” Stiles automatically says, grabbing the phone from Lydia.

Of course, then he sees the screen. He…might have a bit of an overreaction. After all, it’s not like it’s anything new. Actually, from Peter it’s practically a sign that the man is having a midlife crisis, repeating himself that obviously. It’s definitely something Stiles has dealt with before and not broken a sweat over. A couple dishes and his jeep’s back fender, but hey, it happens.

“I don’t even make him promise not to pull that shit anymore,” Stiles says. He pauses to stare at the flock of geese crossing the sky. “All I ask for, is he fucking tell me. That’s all. Tell me. And you know, sometimes I don’t stop him. Sometimes I just let him dick around, because I am _not_ a control freak and he wants to feel like he’s still him, and nobody gets permanently hurt. I mean. Who didn’t have it coming to them anyway.”

“Stiles, I…well, you know what I think about people getting hurt,” Scott sighs. “But getting back to Peter, I think he really does love you.”

“Yeah, I know, which is why when he does this kind of stuff, it’s just so— _God_. I don’t ask him to fucking change, I just want some fucking accommodations,” Stiles says, slapping his hand over his face. “Early warning. It’s not a lot.”

Scott mumbles under his breath. He’s trying to come up with something, bless him and his unconditionally supportive best friend ways, but he always has been and always will be out of his depth when it comes to Peter. Which is why Peter was never on _him_ , Stiles thinks savagely.

“I have favorable early-termination clauses in all the contracts,” Lydia says after a few minutes of silence.

“Oh, wow, I think—I think we should wait just a second,” Scott stammers. “I think—Mom says you don’t make good decisions when you’re mad.”

“I’m not saying make a decision, even though we only have till nine to finish the rehearsal,” Lydia says acidly. “I’m just providing some information that may be useful in the decision-making process.”

“No, I know, and thanks,” Stiles says, flapping his hand in Lydia’s direction. “No, really, thanks. I know it’s not part of your world-changing plan to tie up months of your life living up to throwback Martha Stewart roles, just because I’m…I’m too interested in creating working herbalist flower arrangements to make sure the seating plan doesn’t start a war. I know it’s really sucked, Lyds, but you took it for me anyway.”

“Well, I have an interest in living in this town afterward,” Lydia says, a little more softly. Then she picks her way across the roof, grabbing the hand Scott puts out for balance, till she can stand over Stiles and make him look at her. “I know you’re angry at him. _I_ am furious with him, and I will be no matter what he says or does to you. But…he is going to say something, or do something. You know you don’t need to let him, if you don’t want to, but he will.”

“Yeah. Yeah,” Stiles says. He watches her till she gives him the tiniest smile, and then he puts his hand over his face.

Lydia walks back, and then tells Scott to get up and help her get off the roof if he wants this wedding to have any chance of happening. Scott says okay in a hesitant way, probably wondering if he needs to go back for Stiles, but then both of their footsteps fade, disappearing into the roof hatch.

Stiles is up there by himself for a while, watching the sky blush and then darken as the sun sets. The birds go away, and a couple bats wheel around instead. And then somebody else comes out onto the roof, and it’s not Peter.

“Peter’s talking to your father,” Chris says.

“Great,” Stiles says flatly, looking over. “So you’re here because…”

Chris holds out Stiles’ socks, with his usual stoneface. Stiles…can’t help it, he snorts and then he pushes himself up and takes the socks. As he’s pulling his shoes off to put them on, Chris comes a step nearer, then crouches down across from him, bracing up against a ridge.

“I don’t like Peter,” Chris says.

Stiles pauses in between socks to look at him, but Chris isn’t looking back. Chris is looking at the ground below. “We’ve noticed,” Stiles says.

“I’d like to say that he was when I figured out you don’t have to like somebody to have a good fuck, but I’d be kidding myself,” Chris then adds.

Fortunately for Stiles’ shoes, he charmed them to stick to the roof while he was busy with his socks, because otherwise, with the way his feet spasm into them, they’d be goners. “Okay. I do not think ‘we’ noticed that, though I’ll admit I had some suspicions.”

“According to him, you two have had some very long and detailed discussions for you to just have suspicions about me,” Chris says dryly.

The weird—and weirdly delightful—thing about Chris is he’s just your epitome of old-school stoic manliness, but then when he feels like it, he’ll just break out the truth, no shame or surprise. Which okay, fits together, the whole telling it like it is ‘cause that’s how it _is_ , but it’s just how he does it. His deadpan is something that Stiles has envied since before Stiles noticed anything except how the guy was trying to kill some very good friends of his.

“Are you…are you hitting on me?” Stiles finally says. “Trying to make me feel better? Or some…other thing?”

Chris grimaces, then finally looks over. And that’s just the killer, because he can be blunt and uncompromising and still somehow flash a tender spot amid all the crusty hunter stuff, and make it look natural. “I think I’m trying to say, he’s a son of a bitch, Stiles. And if anybody’s going to say that and mean it, it’s me. But when I look at you two—I’m not going to lie, I have mixed feelings about it, but one feeling I don’t have is the feeling that I need to step in because you can’t handle it.”

“And that’s not what you’re doing right now?” Stiles says.

“ _Helping out_ is different,” Chris says pointedly. “I know Scott still has trouble with that, but I think you usually get it.”

Stiles…nods, and then finishes pulling on his shoes. He unsticks them from the roof so he can pull his legs up and tie the laces. “True. I love Scotty, but true.”

Chris sighs again, but it’s just his resigned ‘damn it, Scott’ sigh so Stiles doesn’t look over till he’s up on his feet, heading in. He has to then, because he’s got to pass Chris on the way, and the other man decides he’s going to get up too. So Stiles figures what the hell and grabs Chris by the arm.

“So, you just having a charitable impulse or something?” Stiles says. He’s got Chris on the sleeve, but the roof slants under them so as they move, his grip slides off that and onto Chris’ bare wrist. He could be making it up, what with not having the werewolf hearing and just fallible human senses, but he thinks Chris’ pulse is up.

“Not really,” Chris says. And when he looks over this time, there’s just a little _frisson_ , like maybe something interesting might be lurking under his irritated amusement. “That idea of Peter’s that you got him going on, I thought about it. And—”

“It _was_ his idea,” Stiles has to say. “I don’t make him do things. Well. Not all the time.”

“Yeah, well, I could tell the way he was thinking about it, that was all him,” Chris says dryly. “And he’s got a point. Devil you know, and keep them close.”

They get to the hatch and Stiles hangs back. Chris hesitates like he’s going to say something, but then drops in first and climbs down the ladder. His head is level with the roof when Stiles crouches down and bends over so that their faces are almost touching.

“The more the better, too?” Stiles says.

Chris stops and considers him, and then—the man smiles, wolf-like and close, and man, it is something glorious. “I think at my age, I’m not looking for something where I have to _step in_ ,” he says. “Not saying it doesn’t work for everybody, but you grow out of things. And right now—”

“Oh, I think we’re gonna figure out right now,” Stiles says, grinning. “Right after I find that fiancé of mine.”

* * *

“I think you should wait a second,” Derek says, hastily standing up.

Stiles’ father looks him up and down, and then shakes his head. “Yeah, no, I need a word with him.”

Derek stays where he is, blocking off the doorway. “Look, it’s because when he looks like that, I’m pretty sure he’s trying to decide whether he wants to be seriously evil again.”

“I figured.” Most of the time, Stiles’ father is a sensible, cautious person who understands that warnings are warnings for a reason, and Derek appreciates being able to work with him. But once in a while, like right now, he and Stiles both have this look like the sheer idiocy of the world is going to blow shit up and it will be _you_ if you don’t move.

Derek sighs and moves. Behind him, Peter gets up from the table. His clothes are still disheveled and he reeks of sex and desperation, and the eyes he turns on Stiles’ dad are a little glassy.

“You’re a moron,” Stiles’ dad says. “If you’d just told him that Blackwood gets an invite because he did some favor for you and Talia back in the day, you know he would’ve just nodded and worked around it, but you had to try and fix it yourself and now Blackwood wants to bring Morrell. You know Stiles isn’t going to okay that, if only for Erica and Boyd’s sakes.”

Peter works his jaw like he’s breaking through years of rust on the hinge. “I know.”

Stiles’ dad stares him down for another second, then sighs. “Listen, this wedding’s got my kid stressed out. He’s letting Lydia show it for him, but he’s been hiding it because he knows what having it means to you, and he’s got some stupid idea that if you see him stressed, you’re going to take it the wrong way and read it as he doesn’t love you. Or…maybe that’s not so stupid.”

“John,” Peter finally says. “I…appreciate—”

“Just goddamn apologize to him, and don’t do it again,” Stiles’ dad says. He takes a half-step back without taking his eyes off Peter, and it is in no way, shape, or form ceding ground. “Also, Peter? I was holding back because I didn’t want to stress Stiles even more, and I know word will get back to him, but this seems as good a time as any.”

“I’m aware that you have wolfsbane bullets especially for me,” Peter says. He still looks a little shocked, but he sounds amused so he must be recovering.

Stiles’ father rolls his eyes. “Don’t be stupid, he would find those. What I’ve got, memorized, is the contact info of a couple people willing to pull me out of the grave if it turns out I have unfinished business with you. Okay?”

Peter blinks hard, and then glances at Derek, who shrugs and makes a note to himself that, even if he’s never admitting it to Stiles, he is grateful Stiles cut their moment short. “Noted,” Peter says, a little less certain of himself.

“And just take a deep breath and think about how sorry you are, and you’ll be fine,” Stiles’ father says, finally walking out of the room. “He loves you, even if you’re an idiot. He’s not dumping you yet.”

Derek backs out to let Stiles’ dad pass by, then sees Allison rounding the corner. She’s breathing a little hard and has to catch herself against the wall, but she puts up a thumbs-up. Then she waves for Derek to come over to her, and pulls him into a room down the hall.

With, it turns out, Scott, who shuts the door just before Stiles and Chris Argent, discussing something about frequent-flyer miles, walk by. Scott doesn’t push the door all the way into the frame, and as soon as the pair pass it, he eases it open a crack. “He’s probably going to put a privacy spell up, and it’s kind of a private moment for them anyway,” Scott says, apologetic, as Chris excuses himself and detours off, leaving Stiles to mutter at Peter to just get in the room. “But Lydia just asked if I could—”

“Oh, come on, we all want to make sure it’ll be okay,” Allison says, poking Scott in the shoulder. Then she looks at Derek. “Right?”

Actually, yeah, Derek does want it to be fine. Because bizarre as they are, Stiles and Peter get on in ways that nobody else in the world will, and it actually seems to make Peter, at least, more tolerable. Less likely to send them all down in hellfire and brimstone, anyway. And…well, Peter is Derek’s uncle. Which is complicated, but even if it’s Peter, Derek thinks it’s a good sign for all of their family that somebody’s getting a happy ending.

“Okay, they’re talking,” Scott mutters, snugging up to the crack. “They’re going back into the…they shut the door.”

Allison’s already on him, clinging to his shoulders as she tries to press her head to the crack, too. It’s been a while since Derek’s seen them so touchy-feely, he thinks, and…he’s got an annoying amount of feelings about it, which he doesn’t have time to sort out because Allison reaches back and grabs him by the front of his shirt, and then hauls him into the Scott-and-Allison mush.

“But you can still hear, right?” she hisses. “What are they saying?”

“Um, um, Peter’s saying sorry,” Scott says. “He’s saying…he’s saying he wasn’t trying to lie…”

Derek’s barely balancing on his toes, and that’s only because he’s basically draping himself on Scott’s back, with Scott’s ass shoved right—he twists and gets his arm over Allison, bracing himself against the wall. But she seems to take that as him trying to get away and twists her hand more in his shirt, till the collar’s pulled so far down her knuckles are bumping against his breastbone.

“Stiles is calling him a total liar,” Derek grunts, hoping she’ll loosen up once she realizes he’s helping. “Also, mad that it’s Deucalion, of all people, and Peter should’ve known that if you give the guy anything, he’ll—”

“Oh, okay, Peter’s course-correcting, he’s apologizing again and saying he knew that and he was an idiot and he just hopes Stiles can forgive him,” Scott says. “He just thought he should do something for this wedding, since, um, since Stiles is going through all this trouble—”

Something crashes to the ground. Derek’s squished in so tight that he can tell just from how Allison’s elbow jabs his belly that she’s going for the garrote lining her belt and not the knife in her boot.

“The _one_ time you’re _supposed_ to be a self-serving bastard!” Stiles shouts.

“Hang on a second,” Scott says, grabbing Allison’s arm without turning his head. He pushes up against the door, then sighs in relief. “No, it’s okay, they’re…um, they’re making out.”

“Also, plotting how to make Morrell not show up. They’re talking about sending poisoned brownies,” Derek says. “I think they’re good again.”

Allison glances at him, then also sags against the door. “Well, thank God, because for a second there I think we all—”

She sags a little too hard, and the door, which was not completely shut, now is. And she had let go of Derek, but Derek only notices that because Allison lost her balance and yelped and grabbed Derek again. 

The moment she calls out, Scott twitches around and his shoulder knocks into Derek, and then his chin cracks against Derek’s shoulder as he tries to straighten up. Derek was halfway to extricating himself from Allison’s grip, but Scott’s double-tap pushes him forward again and then he’s just trying to get his hands on the wall or the door so he won’t flatten her.

“Oh,” Allison says, and Derek looks up and. 

They’re close. She’s staring.

“Oh,” she says again, slightly firmer, and she wraps up her hands in his shirt as he starts to push back. “So. Scott and I were talking.”

“We…I thought we were going to do this—are we doing this now?” Scott says, looking nervously between her and Derek. Nervous and guilty, like Derek’s just caught Scott out, and there’s a—there’s a weird spike in his scent. He’s excited too.

Allison starts to look at him and Derek moves back. She jerks back around, a determined look on her face, and—well, she’s already grabbing him but she moves from grabbing his shirt to grabbing his head. “Hey, Derek,” she says, right before she kisses him.

Derek enjoys it. He’s fucking human and he’s been—these two—he can’t help but take a little moment, okay. But then he pushes back, already trying to twist towards Scott to—to say something, say he’s just going to leave and they can work their thing out, except Scott’s not where he was. Scott is about three inches over, and that might not seem like a lot, but it’s enough to let him grab Derek by the hips and push him back up into Allison, and—and _her_ hands are sliding over Scott’s, their fingers lacing into each other across Derek’s hips.

“We were talking, and I just really want to be clear, we’re not trying to use you or anything like that,” Scott says earnestly. He’s stepped up so close that the only way Derek can’t look at Scott is to close his eyes. “We like you, Derek. You, okay? We both really like spending time with you, and okay, so you also make it a lot easier for us to talk, but that’s not the—”

Sometimes Derek has these moments where he denies himself something he wants because he’s afraid for his family, or worried he’ll just get himself into more trouble, or things like that. He’s not actually a martyr, as he understands the term—martyrs gladly sacrifice themselves for the greater good, and he _hates_ giving up things, considering how rare it is that something good actually does come his way. But he does it because he thinks there’s a good reason.

This is not one of those moments, so he hitches across the intervening space and kisses Scott mid-explanation, and keeps at it till he smells _alpha_ in Scott’s scent and feels a hungry growl slip out of the other man’s mouth into his own. 

“I’m actually okay if you want to use me for that,” he mumbles, as they back up and their mouths temporarily part.

“But we’re _not_ , we like _you_ ,” Scott says, with that heartfelt, determined tone he uses every time he promises somebody he’ll make it all right. Right before pulling Derek up and kissing like _that’s_ the seal on the vow.

“Well, but Derek’s right,” Allison says, looping her arms around them both, her breasts pressing up against Derek’s back as she nuzzles up the side of Derek’s nape. “He’s definitely good for us, I can already tell.”

Derek groans because he wants her to know he’s listening, but he also doesn’t want to take his tongue out of Scott’s mouth. Allison laughs, low and warm, and then she shifts her head and just—she _bites_ Derek’s throat, right as Scott’s growling drops into the alpha register.

Honestly, whatever. Derek’ll go with it.


	7. Chapter 7

They already had to change up the traditional ceremony, since neither Stiles nor Peter were interested in gendered roles and both sides of the altar—which was actually a weapons cache made up to look like a lectern, because John wanted somewhere to put his notes—had mixed sexes: Scott, Lydia and Erica were standing up for Stiles, while Derek, Laura and Cora were doing the same for Peter. And then there was the fact that John had worked out some sort of ordination with Deaton so he could handle the officiating.

“He’s my kid, I don’t think it’s any stranger than me giving him away,” John mutters, glowering out at the gathered crowd. “Besides, if somebody’s going to oversee them swearing about things like health and death to each other, it’s going to be me.”

“I just told Parrish to hit the silencing spells,” Lydia mutters. “Minus two till entrance music.”

Stiles had insisted on walking the aisle even if his father wouldn’t be escorting him. He’d framed it as a last visual weapons check before he and Peter had their backs to a bunch of people who’d tried to kill them, but really, he just wanted the chance to strut up while Peter stared longingly at him in front of a bunch of people who assumed they’d be easily dismissed. Which is a little juvenile, but it’s an impulse Lydia understands so she’d let that one go.

She’d had too many other fights on her plate anyway. Honestly, even as the opening chords of the organist’s take on the _Ghostbusters_ theme song start up, she’s still running through her head to see what else needs to be cut off and tied shut.

And then Lydia takes a deep breath, and reminds herself that actually, this is _it_. She’s…she’s almost done. They just need to get through the ceremony and the reception, and it’ll be over.

John makes an odd noise and Lydia turns around, reaching into her bouquet for her syringe of universal antidote. But then she sees the wet look of his eyes, and she…she pulls on a smile, because Laura’s peering curiously at them, and steps back into place. “John?” she murmurs.

“Yeah, yeah. Be okay by the time he gets up here,” John says under his breath. Still, he’s looking down, fiddling with his notecards. “Just…I guess if I got him here, I did a good job.”

“You did,” Lydia says, very softly.

He looks up at her, smiling. She smiles back and it’s…it’s just nice. John takes a deep breath, glances forward, and then, for some reason, looks at her again. “Listen, I didn’t want to get in your way, you’ve been doing a hell of a lot, and I just—didn’t want to pressure you, in case you weren’t looking for anything. But I want to get you dinner sometime.”

Lydia stiffens. “What?”

John looks her right in the eye. He’s got that sleepy-eyed, deprecating small-town sheriff act down to a science, but behind that is one of the most unnervingly steady gazes she’s ever seen, second only to the one Stiles deploys whenever he thinks they need to take up a cause. “Dinner. If you want. Nothing to do with the wedding, or you taking care of Stiles—well, aside from recognizing the patience that needs, but this isn’t about getting him a new mom, God forbid. I’ve been racking my brain how to not make this sound like a creepy old man, but I’ve watched you all turn into the people you are now, and I like what I see with you, Lydia. I’d like to see more. That’s all.”

“Wait, what?” Erica hisses.

John winces, as if he’d actually forgotten that the silencing spells just keep them from hearing the guests. And Peter is looking right at Lydia and smirking like she has _not_ given him the best possible start on married life with Stiles, and it’s just very lucky for the whole wedding party’s life expectancies that Stiles turns into the center aisle just then.

Peter’s eyes snap to Stiles, and he looks so genuinely thrilled that even the oldest banshee in the room looks touched. Lydia texts Parrish to tranq her the second she starts to wail, and then catches Stiles’ eye. Stiles looks giddy too, to the point that he stumbles a little bit and instead of grinning it off, his face freezes in a rictus of near-panic. She almost goes out to him, but at the last second he straightens up, looks at Peter, and makes it safely down the aisle.

“All right,” John says, clearing his throat. His voice is still a little thick. “We’re all here today because—”

“Hale, I’m here to—” screams one of the people in the back row as they stand up.

Jackson and Boyd are immediately on him, while John keeps on going with the introduction. John does stick his hand into the lectern for his gun, and it’s a good thing since just as he asks Peter to recite his vows, a lightning bolt suddenly cracks across the windows on one side of the building. The sky was perfectly clear as of ten minutes ago.

Lydia will give him credit, Peter does attempt to get through his speech. But three sentences in, Stiles jumps him, rolls them out of the way of a wild-eyed, ax-swinging Derek, and then lashes out with one foot to kick apart the lectern.

“Whatever, license was done yesterday, we’re technically _already_ married,” Stiles says, coming up with a half-assembled rocket launcher.

Scott tumbles across the room to slam in a round for Stiles, and then Chris Argent appears to flip up a couple chairs to shield them from flying icicles as Stiles fires it. The next seven and a half minutes are a little hairy, mostly because the non-murderous guests are annoyingly forgetful about the detailed evacuation plans Lydia made sure they all got, but nobody dies, the worst injury is a broken wrist—on a were, so it’s just a pain to set properly—and the gate-crashing necromancers are dead.

“That went well,” Peter mutters, absently brushing at his stained, shredded suit.

“I know, right?” Stiles says, flopping down beside him. He dusts off Peter’s arm, which makes Peter look at him while Cora and Derek gag, and then frowns and pulls something out of Peter’s trouser-pocket. It’s a little slip of paper, which he unfolds and then scans. “Oh…wow, you actually wrote out something?”

“Yes,” Peter says. His tone is odd, clearly less smug and more nervous than normal. “Well, even if we were banking on them being impatient, I wanted to be prepared.”

Stiles is taking an unusually long time to read the paper, considering its size, and when he finally looks up, his expression is a little shaky. “You wrote this?”

“I,” Peter starts. He pauses, looking at Stiles. “Yes. Yes, I did.”

“I, um,” Stiles mutters, looking down at the side of his face. “I just had the paper, I didn’t actually…I didn’t think we’d…”

“Stiles, you married _me_ ,” Peter says, shifting so that their shoulders are touching. “You don’t need to have a speech on top of that.”

“God, that’s so cute I hate myself, but I almost kind of want Uncle Peter for a boyfriend,” Cora mutters, as Stiles abruptly twists around and climbs onto Peter’s lap and kisses him so hard Peter flops over onto his back. “Laura. Help.”

“There you go, munchkin,” Laura says, thwapping Cora on the head. Though then she looks at the pair of them and she grins.

Lydia gets to her feet and looks around, then spots Chris digging at something near a pile of collapsed, splintered chairs. She goes over just as he steps back, closing his hand around something that glints. “I found—” he starts.

She grabs his arm and hauls him across the room to Stiles and Peter, ignoring his questions, and then jerks his arm down. Lydia just wants him to open his hand, and Chris is a highly-trained hunter and he really should be better than tripping over Peter’s foot like that, landing with a grunt on both of their legs as he shoves the rings at them.

“Oh, thanks!” Stiles says to Chris. He takes the rings, then throws his leg over Chris’ knees as Chris tries to twist around and get back up. “And thanks, Lyds, you always know what I want—”

“Oh, _do_ I?” Lydia says, crossing her arms over her chest.

Stiles goes still. His eyes twitch slightly to the side, where Peter is mustering up a very charming smile.

“You said the intel said they’d charge the reception,” Lydia snaps, ignoring Peter. “I _planned_ for that. I budgeted an extra two grand for the security detail for the cake _alone_.”

“Stiles! You said you cleared it with her!” Laura says. Then she throws up her hands and backs quickly away, as both Stiles and Lydia look at her.

“I know, but there was a slight last-minute change, and you were looking like hell, Lyds, you really were, and I’ve been riding your coattails,” Stiles says, turning back. “But also, I’ve been paying attention and I knew I could tweak stuff without having to drag you into it, and I mean, look, we totally had enough weapons, all the angles were covered, we—”

“I,” Lydia says, icily enough that even Stiles knows to shut up.

She looks at him for another second, then pivots. John was already heading over, a deep frown on his face, so Lydia just has to take one more step to put her hand on his arm. He looks at her in confusion, but doesn’t resist as she tugs him towards her and looks back at Stiles.

“I am taking your father,” Lydia says.

Stiles blinks. “What?”

“ _John_ ,” Lydia says pointedly, as beside her, John makes an ‘ah’ of comprehension and then a snorting, bemused sound. “Has asked me out to dinner. And seeing as we’ve already had sex and I very much enjoyed it, _Stiles_ , I’ve decided to take him up on the offer. And you—”

Stiles is already choking. Peter has the temerity to glare at Lydia as he leans over and pounds on Stiles’ back, but he winces and drops his eyes when Lydia turns her full stare on him.

“—you are going on your honeymoon. You are going, and you will do whatever you’re going to do with your husband and Chris there, and you will _not text, call, or email your father about what’s going on_ ,” Lydia says. 

She pauses, because John’s arm is moving, but as she looks over, he’s already wrapping his fingers loosely around her hand. She returns his grin, just for a second, and then starts pulling him towards the door. She needs to get over to the reception even earlier now; she doesn’t doubt that Stiles did handle the security changes, but he probably didn’t think to warn the caterers that all their guests would be showing up ahead of time, hungry and thirsty as only the recently traumatized can be.

“Oh, my God,” Stiles moans.

“We’ll talk about step-moms when you’re back,” Lydia adds.

Stiles makes a desperate, disbelieving noise and then buries his head in a shushing, frantically patting Peter’s chest. She turns back to John, who’s raising his brows, and shrugs.

“Oh, no interest there either,” she says. “But. Well. You saw him.”

“You’re one of a kind,” John says, just before he steps her through the doorway and up against the wall beside it, and kisses her silly.

Well. They went through the trouble of scheduling a wedding ceremony, after all. She supposes _somebody_ had to end it properly.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm tossing around a couple ficlet ideas for the reception and honeymoon, which I may put up later as an epilogue. But the main story is basically done.


	8. Reception Dinner Epilogue 1: Erica tells off Deucalion

Erica rounds the table, a little distracted by the _very_ fine backside view of a passing deputy, and then feels her whole face freeze as she finds herself on the opposite side of a not-wide-enough punch bowl from Deucalion.

“Oh,” Deucalion says. He’s still trying to pull off the sunglasses-indoors thing, even though seriously, even the druids know he has his sight back. He does at least look uncomfortable too, though she can already tell he’s falling back on the whole me-alpha, me-boss factor. “Erica, wasn’t it?”

“Yeah, you torturing asshole, not that I was really expecting you to bother learning my name,” Erica says. 

She’s loud enough that heads start turning her way, and a tiny part of her, the part that still wants to stand up and squee _I’m a werewolf omgomg_ , cringes. The rest of her—bares her teeth and raises her voice even more. Because it’s been a few years, and a lot has happened in the meantime, and hey, people can change. She did, after all. She’s gotten better.

“Yeah, yeah, whatever, so I heard about your return to sanity,” she says, right over whatever ridiculous thing Deucalion was trying to squeeze out, with that sickly smile of his. “So I don’t buy it, and even if I did? Well, guess what, motherfucker, it doesn’t matter ‘cause the shit you did to us? Take a good look around. You see this? You see this awesome wedding, and you see my pack? See ‘em? See how strong and tight and _happy_ we are? And you? What you got? Far as I can tell, you got _nothing_. And that was _aaaall_ you, asshole.”

When she starts, most of the pack’s at the other side of the room, crowded up around the wedding party’s table. So…okay, Erica does kind of expect Boyd to be there when she turns on her heel, his hand raised for a high-five. She’s more surprised when Stiles appears right behind him, grinning like mad and practically falling on his face to get his arm around her shoulders.

“Mic drop, boom,” he says, letting her squeeze him around the waist. “Erica, Erica, Erica. Have I told you lately how much I love it when you bitch-slap an alpha?”

“Yep, but you’re gonna go off and sex Peter up in the woods for a few weeks, so feel free to make up for that in advance,” Erica says. She’s a little jittery for the first few steps and she hugs Stiles partly to hide that; he goes with it without so much as a look, careering them off into the crowd till she gets over her urge to glance over her shoulder and see how Deucalion is taking it. “Or, y’know, you could always invite me along.”

Stiles laughs, looking a little shifty around the eyes. “Uh. So. Love you, for sure, but, um, we’re not really running open-door on the honeymoon.”

“Really?” Erica says, pouting at him. “But you _know_ I’m down for the older guy thing. I got you your best Chris photos, did I not?”

“Ah ha ha, yes, you did, you did, but, um. Let’s…stick a pin in that one, at least till I have, um, less pack members wanting shovel talks with me,” Stiles says, looking past her shoulder.

She turns and follows his gaze to find a suspicious Allison looking their way. Honestly, Erica’s sure Allison at least had an inkling, even if the woman was distracted with her Scott issues and their ridiculous inability to notice a lovelorn Derek, but Allison is frighteningly good with that crossbow of hers. And a lot less morally upstanding than Scott, when you get down to it.

“Shouldn’t it be the other way around?” Erica says, turning them instead to face Lydia. Who is standing next to Stiles’ dad, chatting with one of their alpha allies, and…well, technically her hand is in a decent place. The way she’s rubbing it up and down Stiles’ dad’s arm just _looks_ bad. “Also, wow, I was figuring it was just early days, from how they were talking earlier, but you think you’re really gonna have Lydia as a stepmom—”

Stiles makes a low, pained groaning noise, kind of like a cow stuck in the mud. His grip tightens on Erica, not in affection so much as in despair, and his eyes start to roll back into his head. It is super-dramatic, and Erica is not impressed in the least.

The way Peter swoops up and immediately swaps himself for Erica in Stiles’ grip is pretty slick, but it’s still something Erica has seen a zillion times. So is his disappointed look. “Can we _please_ not ruin him for the honeymoon?” he scolds, while Stiles clings to his front, face buried in his chest. “When we’ve all put so much work to just get here.”

“Yeah, yeah, whatever,” Erica says. She takes a step back, heading towards where Boyd and Isaac are waving champagne bottles, then pauses long enough to give the back of Stiles’ head a pat. “Well, let me know when Daddy Argent _is_ open, okay?”

Stiles manages to drag himself out of his trauma long enough to flap a hand back at her. Snorting, Erica plunges back into the celebratory crowd. She’s got fun to have.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So in this 'verse, since Erica and Boyd survived, Scott got a stronger lesson in victims' rights and wasn't just an especially poorly-written Plot Device for handwaving Deucalion's redemption arc. I know the show was writing out Erica, but it could and should have done a much better job showing the effects of what was basically a summer of child abuse and torture by the Alpha Pack via Cora and Boyd. And, for that matter, an actual redemption arc, which should include expressions of regret and apologies for the horrible things you've done in the past, and not just trying to pay it forward. Deucalion still has enough personal power/standing here to have to be accommodated, but people certainly don't have to be _nice_ to him.


	9. Reception Dinner Epilogue 2: Stiles and Peter and Married Sex

The rest of the time, everybody is constantly complaining whenever Stiles and Peter even look dirty at each other, but they seem totally okay with the public make-outs during the reception dinner. Even Derek, that asshole, starts up one round of knife-clinking—even if that’s so Chris isn’t looking when Allison’s arm angles down into Derek’s lap—and Stiles…is not opposed to obliging them, though that means he barely has time to eat.

So anyway, by the time the reception’s finally over, Stiles desperately needs the tube of lip balm that Lydia, who has grudgingly accepted his apology, lends him. He’s also not worried or suspicious when Peter disappears, and he looks around and realizes Chris has gone, too.

He’s kind of irritated when he finds the two of them holed up in a back room, Chris with his back to the wall, Peter kneeling in front of him, but that’s because Peter stuck him with seeing off the formerly-estranged Hale relatives, who certainly hadn’t fallen out of touch because they disagreed with the general family approach to first impressions. “Peter, your second cousins are dicks, and I’m really tempted to let Laura beat them up in the parking lot,” Stiles says, walking in.

Peter doesn’t answer. Chris doesn’t either, though his head snaps up. He’s glassy-eyed, getting close, panting as he kneads Peter’s shoulders with whitened knuckles. His tie’s wrenched loose and the top three buttons of his shirt are undone; his shirt-tails are yanked up from his pants too, showing a couple splotches of bare skin.

Stiles keeps going till he’s right behind Peter. He lets his hands touch down on Peter’s back, then drags them up into Peter’s hair. He can feel Peter shift himself to respond. Not letting up on Chris or anything like that—it’s a lot subtler, how he widens his stance, cants his ass and head back, rolls his shoulders to graze Chris’ hands into Stiles’ knees. “They were all with the, can’t believe Peter’s settling down, and then it was, so _you’re_ what did it, and _then_ it was, can you show us how you did it?”

“Why—why do they need to know?” Chris grunts. He’s almost there, arms shaking, starting to slump forward even before Stiles reaches over and curls a hand around the back of his neck.

For a second Stiles and he just look at each other. His eyes are glinting, that glassiness good and sharp, and Stiles can’t help licking his lips. Totally a good idea, Stiles knew it. “This is gonna be a blast, trust me, you’re gonna like it,” he says, just before hauling Chris forward.

Chris groans into his mouth, and grips Peter hard enough to wring a wince out of him. Stiles laves his way out of the kiss, biting at the side of the man’s jaw, then presses Chris’ head against his cheek. Tilts it down, lets Chris see where Stiles has his hand closed around Peter’s nape, and Chris hisses twice and then bucks forward. He’s hanging for a second, arched spine and brow pinned to Stiles’ cheekbone, and then he shudders to semi-limpness.

Stiles pushes him back against the wall. Peter’s already twisting around, nosing at Stiles’ crotch, and when Stiles nudges his head away, he just cranes around so that Stiles’ fingers hook down into the loop of his tie. Then lets Stiles draw him up, shiny-lipped, smirking-eyed, leaning forward to slide every inch of himself he can against Stiles.

He pouts a little when, after a short round of mutual rubbing, Stiles decides he’d like to fuck Chris. But hey, they’ve got a whole honeymoon coming up, whereas Chris is on his way home.

“I’ll catch up at the gas station off mile marker seventeen,” Chris says, his idea of a till-the-next-round farewell. He edges off the wall, grimacing as his legs suddenly stiffen. And then, when he catches Stiles looking, he—snorts and is totally a second slow in tucking himself back into his pants. “Have to drop off something in that part of the preserve anyway, give me a reason to just call Allison once I’m gone.”

“I think she’s gonna make a late morning of it anyway,” Stiles says. “What? I’m just saying, I think everybody was having a few drinks tonight.”

“Sure you were,” Chris says slowly, still staring at him. But then Chris sighs and turns away, scrubbing at the side of his face. “I…I am not thinking about that till she brings it up, and I’ll just see you tomorrow, all right?”

“Looking forward to it,” Stiles says.

He gives Chris a wave till the door shuts behind the man, then turns back to his…his husband. For real.

“Something the matter?” Peter says, easing up against Stiles’ front. His hands settle on Stiles’ hips, playing with the loosened fabric; Stiles has zipped up but hasn’t done up his belt yet.

“Nah.” Stiles looks at him, then smiles as Peter dips his head, presses their cheeks together and then just breathes. He runs his hand up Peter’s chest, then folds Peter’s shirt-collar out of the way so he can tease his fingertips along the tendon running up the throat. “No. No, I’m good. So…wanna go?”

Peter hums and nuzzles him, so Stiles takes him by one arm and drags him out to their car. They’re not doing the whole, have the crowd see you off scene, though Stiles does take a second to text his dad and Lydia—separately, oh, my _God_ —and Scott to let them know he and Peter are leaving.

Lydia asked whether they wanted to get a hotel room, but they nixed that so they head for Peter’s place. He still keeps it, even though it’s basically storage that he visits every other week; he’s been living in Stiles’ apartment for so long that he’s chairman of the building’s board, regardless of the fact that they don’t actually own the unit. Well—not yet, though they’re going to put in an application as soon as they get back from the honeymoon.

Anyway. “You dusted,” Stiles says as they walk in.

Peter sniffs, which for some reason means he’s got to bend down and do it right along Stiles’ nape, stiffening all the little hairs there. “Of course. I wouldn’t want to spend the first night of our marriage in a filthy dump. That wouldn’t be a good harbinger, would it?”

So, normally? Stiles would be all about the banter. Stiles would turn, and laugh, and zing something back about disprovable omens and the difference between correlation and causation. But—yeah. They’re married now. It’s a little bit different. It’s funny, considering at the end of the day, it’s just words and a couple rings and some paperwork that only means whatever the law decides it means, but it still is.

Stiles turns and puts his hands on Peter’s chest and Peter’s on the same page, just from the way he’s looking at Stiles, all bottomless hunger in his eyes. They wrap around each other and then stumble backwards, hitting the couch, then the table, then the couch again. Then the wall, using that to slide their way to the bedroom, stripping each other as they go. 

Peter gets his hands into Stiles’ pants first thing, then keeps them there, using his mouth and teeth to deal with the rest of Stiles’ clothes. By now Stiles has collected a couple notable scars and Peter visits all of them on the way, lavishing them with attention till Stiles is dragging him back by the hair, sweat scrunching out of the soaked strands, its salt stinging under Stiles’ fingernails. Then he comes back up for long, longing kisses, his mouth tasting of the piece of cake he’d swiped on the way out and eaten during the drive over.

They finally hit the bed, and Stiles rolls them till he can strip the last leg of Peter’s trousers off, then crawls up onto Peter’s back. For a couple seconds Peter’s whiny, because he can’t reach Stiles that way, but then Stiles gets his fingers working into Peter and Peter stops that and starts _whining_ instead, hands dug into the bed, ass hitching up to close around Stiles’ hand, breathless and eager. He doesn’t have scars now, not since Stiles figured out a way to heal up the last of the fire’s marks, but he’s got his soft spots and Stiles gets around to all of them at one point or the other.

The tops of his shoulders. The little stretch of his belly between his bellybutton and cock, where a couple scratches dragging into the hairline can sometimes get him off all on their own. His throat, sure, standard for werewolves, but before Stiles lands there he takes the time to reach around and tease the edges of Peter’s nipples. Not the tips, that sets Peter off too quick, but the edges, just where the flesh starts to firm up. Peter groans and tucks his head back, stretching out his neck, and when Stiles finally leaves off his chest to move up, his hands come up and grab onto Stiles’ hands so hard that it’s not till after they’ve both slackened, lying wound around each other in a clingy mess, that Stiles gets them free.

He doesn’t move them that far, just the couple inches to the bed, and a few seconds later, Peter’s fingers creep up to them again. Not clenching, just brushing against Stiles’ palm, and then one fingertip strays up to spin the ring around Stiles’ finger.

“Hey, so why’d you ask?” Stiles says.

Peter shifts slightly, head tilting up to brush his hair against Stiles’ forehead, buttocks nudging back to semi-grip Stiles’ softened cock. “Ask…you to marry me?”

“Yeah,” Stiles says. “I mean. I figured we were getting there, just…”

Couple things, like timing and preparation, none of which Stiles honestly _cares_ that much about, which is why he hadn’t asked before this. But they make him curious. He folds up closer to Peter, just in case the man hasn’t guessed all that. Takes a nip at Peter’s throat and Peter shudders a little, and deep down, just barely there, Stiles feels the flutter of a purr. So yeah, Peter knows what he means.

“I really didn’t intend for things to go that badly,” Peter says after a long pause. Because he gets it, but still, he can get kind of edgy sometimes. Disbelieving. He thinks the world of himself but he’s used to people not agreeing with him. “I—I just thought, right after it all was over…I wanted to make sure you had something, when I do die.”

Stiles stills, then takes a deep, careful breath.

Peter does too, and then closes his fingers around Stiles’ wrist when Stiles slides a leg over him, tucking them closer together. “I have never, ever cared that someone have something of me after I’m gone,” he eventually goes on. “Even my family. They’re pack, they’ll have what belongs to the pack anyway, and I trust they’ll all be able to manage. But you…I want you to, and I realized right in that moment, that if I’d died there, you wouldn’t have anything significant from me.”

“I can tell that there’s a lot of werewolf custom stuff in that, and we’re gonna unpack that later,” Stiles says. He leans in, lets his mouth drift across Peter’s nape. Lets Peter pull up his hand and mimic the motion, except that Peter does it to his ring finger. “Later.”

“Mmmm,” Peter sighs. He stretches, all satiated luxury, and then settles back against Stiles. “So, since we’re on the subject…why did you?”

“I like how you made that ambiguous, so I can’t just call you stupid for asking me why I said yes,” Stiles snorts.

Peter taps Stiles’ finger against his lips, briefly sucks it in, and then lets it drop out of his mouth, drawing a waft of warm wet breath with it. “Because you love me?”

“Duh,” Stiles says. He snorts again, then shifts his head a little, so it’s in a position against Peter’s head that is comfortable enough he won’t have to move it for a few minutes to an hour, or whenever they decide to get up. “Also, damn it, I’m _keeping_ you. Curses and vendettas and stupidity, whatever, I married you so I get first dibs over everything. Everything, Peter. _Everything_.”

“All right, all right,” Peter murmurs. The lowness of his voice doesn’t even start to hide how utterly pleased he is. “All right, husband mine. I’m not objecting.”

“Husband,” Stiles echoes, and then he grins into Peter’s hair. “Yeah. I do like how that sounds. Husband. That’s good.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It is an American wedding tradition that at the reception, people clink their glasses with silverware to signal that they want to see the newlyweds smooch. Depending on the crowd, there may just be a couple kisses, or it might be one long audience-sanctioned make-out session.
> 
> I originally thought about making this the _end_ end, but ended up moving it to epilogue because one, it was tonally off from the rest of the fic, being a little less about the humor, and two, wrapping with Lydia sticking it to Stiles was just a better cap-off of the running jokes. And the main story ended up more about the pack as an ensemble, and how the wedding was shifting through their lives, whereas this is all about foregrounding Stiles and Peter.


End file.
